What The Hell America!

IF NOTHING ELSE, FRIDAY’S OVAL OFFICE FIASCO among Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky was a decisive masks-off moment. After several weeks of pro-Kremlin tilt with occasional baffling pro-Ukraine lurches—just one day earlier, Trump was suddenly praising Zelensky and promising to help Ukraine “get as much [territory] back as possible”—the spectacle of the president and vice president of the United States tag-teaming to bully the leader of a U.S.-allied democracy fighting for its life against an autocratic aggressor has appalled observers around the world.

The deal that Trump was touting as good for both Ukraine and the United States—giving the latter access to the former’s rare minerals/natural resources, in exchange for who knows what—is off the table, indefinitely. The final shipments of weapons and equipment for Ukraine already authorized by the Biden administration, with about $3.85 billion’s worth of hardware remaining, have stopped and may be canceled. The State Department has also terminated U.S. support for the restoration of Ukraine’s energy grid, constantly battered by Russian attacks. At the end of the meeting, Trump appeared to say that all further American aid would stop unless Zelensky signed a peace agreement with Russia (“You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out”). In a social media post afterward, Trump also wrote that “President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations.” Translating from his word salad, this seems to mean that, in Trump’s view, American support puts Zelensky in too strong a position to accept what Trump considers a good agreement.

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Friday’s photo op was testy from the outset, with a typical Trumpian admixture of bragging, babbling, lying, and stupidity (he repeatedly referred to “raw” earth). The room became more uncomfortable when a reporter from a propaganda outlet—I’m referring to Trump-loving OAN, although it turns out, shockingly, that Russian-state-owned TASS was allowed in, too—baited Zelensky over his choice not to wear a suit during wartime.

But what prompted the final blowup was, precisely, a reasonable question from Zelensky about an essential part of any peace deal: security guarantees. After Vance pompously declared that “what makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy” rather than Joe Biden-style chest-thumping, Zelensky asked for permission to respond (so much for his supposed rudeness!) and then described all the previous agreements Russia had signed and broken between 2014 and 2022. Finally, he asked, “What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about?” Vance, who obviously had no good answer to these points, snippily replied that it was “the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.” Vance then chided Zelensky for being “disrespectful.” Things went downhill from there, with Vance berating Zelensky for forcibly conscripting soldiers and—in response to Zelensky’s invitation to visit Ukraine and see its fight with his own eyes—for conducting “propaganda tours.”

Trump, in turn, accused Zelensky of “gambling with World War III” and not wanting a ceasefire, as well as being “disrespectful to this country.” Even more bizarrely, at the tail end of the difficult-to-watch conversation, he reminded the Ukrainian president that “I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy,” presumably through American military aid—the same aid he had just derided as the doing of a “stupid president,” i.e. Joe Biden. Trump also touted the debunked figure of $350 billion in aid that the United States supposedly gave to Ukraine since the start of the war; the real amount is much less than half that figure. And recall that Trump had tried to block aid to Ukraine in 2023–24, and succeeded in long delaying it, through pressure on Republicans in Congress—an interruption that bears a large share of the blame for current Ukrainian troubles on the frontlines.

(The swipes at Biden by both Trump and Vance at several points during the meeting are the sort of norm-smashing that would have been utterly shocking in the not-so-distant old days but barely rates a raised eyebrow under the second Trump administration.)

In a further display of dishonest pettiness, Vance repeatedly slammed Zelensky for his supposed failure to be appropriately thankful—obviously not just to America, to which Zelensky had repeatedly expressed gratitude, but to Trump himself. Yet a look at the full video of the meeting shows Zelensky thanking Trump twice—or even three times, if “Thank you, Mr. President; thank you for the invitation” is counted as two thank-yous. That’s not to mention the many other instances in which he was deferential and complimentary—praising, for instance, Trump’s “good will to stop this war.” Even at the start of the culminating contentious exchange, while detailing Putin’s past ceasefire agreement violations to Vance, Zelensky threw in, “God bless, now President Trump will stop him.”

Vance also resurrected the Republican gripe that Zelensky “campaigned for the opposition”—i.e., the Democrats—when he visited a munitions plant in Pennsylvania with Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Kamala Harris surrogate, last September. Never mind that during the same trip to the United States, Zelensky actively sought a meeting with Trump, even after the Republican candidate publicly mocked him as a grifter milking billions from the United States. Four days after the Scranton visit, Trump and Zelensky did meet at Trump Tower in New York and had a joint press appearance; Zelensky also posted a gracious comment about that meeting on his Telegram account.

At the time, Zelensky had to swallow some humiliation to walk the tightrope of staying on good terms with both parties in the U.S. election. Now, a lot of people including formerly pro-Ukraine Republican leaders like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are assailing the Ukrainian president for not groveling enough on Friday’s visit—on the heels of being taunted by Trump as a “dictator” and blamed for the war. Graham even asserted that Trump had given “a masterclass on how to stand up for America.” Of course, Graham could teach a masterclass on groveling and self-abasement, with Rubio as his teaching assistant.

To repeat: The claim that Zelensky was disrespectful is bunk, even if he sometimes got frustrated during Vance’s smug and preening harangues. It was Vance who was nasty and ill-tempered in response to an entirely civil question from Zelensky and got even more insulting as the exchange went on. In the Atlantic, Tom Nichols argues that Vance’s very presence at the meeting, given his notorious anti-Ukraine animus, suggests a setup to provoke Zelensky and create a pretext for a rift. The decision to let the conversation unfold in front of the press rather than holding it in private after a brief photo op and then doing a scheduled press conference after the minerals deal was signed could be taken as further evidence of an ambush. It’s hard to say: Trump and Vance couldn’t have known for sure that Zelensky, who has experience in placating Trump, would not be more circumspect. But premeditated or not, the confrontation was clearly initiated and escalated by Vance, with Trump’s encouragement.

SO WAS THE AGREEMENT WITH UKRAINE deliberately sabotaged? One plausible explanation is that the Kremlin is not open to a peace deal unless it gets everything it wants—and, having failed to strong-arm Zelensky into such a deal, Trump decided to make him the scapegoat since he regards his relationship with Russia as far more valuable. (The natural resources deal with Ukraine, experts say, would likely not yield any profits for a while, if ever.)

For all of Trump’s inane chatter about Putin’s desire for peace, there is plenty of evidence of Russian intransigence. Just two days ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov firmly rejected a peace settlement that would let Russia keep the Ukrainian lands it currently occupies, but not hand over the four Ukrainian provinces which it has formally annexed—and most of which it doesn’t control. Lavrov even added that any agreement would have to require the rest of Ukraine to alter its “racist” laws privileging Ukrainian language over Russian in public life. And, while Trump had earlier claimed that he had asked Putin about European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine and received an encouraging response, Lavrov quickly shot down that notion, saying that “no one asked us about it.”

One might expect the thin-skinned Trump to take umbrage at being made to look like either a chump or a liar—but no, he still has only nice things to say about the Moscow autocrat. During the disastrous Oval Office meeting, he faulted Zelensky for “the hatred he’s got for Putin.” More bizarrely still, he repeatedly expressed sympathy for Putin as a fellow victim of the “Russia hoax,” unfairly blamed for 2016 election interference:

Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me, he went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia—Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? That was a phony.

This is a lie: The 2019 report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller found that Russian interference in the 2016 election was real. (With regard to Trump himself, the report stated that the investigation ultimately “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, [but] it also does not exonerate him.”) Moreover, the Mueller probe resulted in a host of indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions. But pity poor Putin, whom Trump apparently trusts because of this shared ordeal.

Trump doesn’t need to be (as some conspiracy theorists have long maintained he is) a Russian agent. His pettiness, ego, and habit of dividing the world into friends and enemies based on personal interests will do the trick. And Putin doesn’t need a “pee tape” or other blackmail material to play Trump like a fiddle.

What Ukraine and Europe can do next is a separate and difficult question. But there is little doubt that after Trump’s performance on Friday in the Oval Office, they were breaking out the champagne in the Kremlin.