It was a sickening spectacle: the man who tried to upend democracy bullying the man who is fighting for democracy.
The air seemed to turn flame red as the TV stars-turned-pols sat side by side in elegant yellow armchairs and had the wildest dust-up ever televised from the Oval Office.
“This is going to be great television – I will say that,” president Donald Trump noted. The Ukrainian ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, hung her head in her hands.
It looked like a set-up. Vice-president JD Vance, a malign presence who has said he does not care a fig about Ukraine, chided Volodymyr Zelenskiy for not being grateful enough to America, ie, Trump.
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“Have you said, ‘Thank you’ once this entire meeting?” Vance pressed Zelenskiy, who has thanked America over and over.
Trump barked at Zelenskiy, “You’re gambling with World War III” and wagged a finger at him: “You’ve got to be more thankful because, let me tell you, you don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards.”
Pretty rich for a draft dodger to lecture a man whose name has become synonymous with wartime bravery. (Trump once said that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was his personal “Vietnam”.)
When a reporter asked what would happen if Russia broke the ceasefire again, Trump snapped, “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?”
The bust of Winston Churchill so beloved by Trump watched over the three men as they sparred. Can you imagine FDR petulantly ordering Churchill to be more thankful? Can you imagine Churchill’s chilly disdain for Trump’s protection-racket demand for Ukraine’s minerals?
As though this weren’t enough humiliation, a member of the president’s new handpicked press pool, Brian Glenn of the right-wing Real America’s Voice, asked Zelenskiy, “Why don’t you wear a suit?” And then: “Do you own a suit?”
Even though we should be used to it by now, it was still shocking to see Trump parrot the view of Vladimir Putin, a murderous tyrant who wants to swallow Ukraine in a fit of nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Trump insisted that they were fellow victims.
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said, as though they were army buddies. “He went through a phoney witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.” US intelligence agencies found that Russia meddled in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
“You see the hatred he’s got for Putin,” Trump said of Zelenskiy. “It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”
The president doesn’t understand why Zelenskiy is not happy with Putin for invading the smaller country and beating the bejesus out of it, for decimating a generation of young Ukrainian soldiers, for breaking ceasefires and committing war crimes.
Zelenskiy deserves our thanks. He has endured so much, keeping the David versus Goliath dream alive, exposing the weakness of the Russian military and basically taking it on the chin for the rest of Europe to keep Putin from gobbling up more territory.
But instead of being gracious, Trump booted Zelenskiy out of the White House, leaving the hero’s lunch on a tray in the hall, torpedoing his existential fight to save his battered country and Ukrainian lives.
Republican lickspittles like Lindsey Graham and Jim Banks praised Trump and trashed Zelenskiy while Russian leaders rejoiced. “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office,” said Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and Putin toady.
A cascade of gobsmacked western leaders wrapped Zelenskiy in a warm online embrace. “Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader,” said Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, posted, “Il y a un agresseur: la Russie.”
European leaders had tried to guide Trump in the days before Zelenskiy arrived, but Trump is wedded to his demented dream of a troika of strongmen – himself, Putin and Xi Jinping – astride the world.
Macron and prime minister Keir Starmer of Britain came to Washington, humouring Trump. Starmer grandly delivered a cream envelope with an “unprecedented” invitation from King Charles III for a second state visit, perhaps to Balmoral.
A real king soothing the ego of a hooligan who thinks he’s a king.
All the flattery did not soften up Trump. It puffed him up. Everyone is so obsequious around Trump that he now gets huffy at the least pushback. He can make any claim, no matter how outrageous – that Ukraine started the war with Russia, that Zelenskiy is a “dictator.” But if anyone points out that he is wrong, he blows a gasket.
After Trump flew off to Mar-a-Lago, Zelenskiy did an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News. He did not apologise when Baier asked him if he should. “I can’t, you know, change our Ukrainian attitude to Russia,” he said, adding that Putin wants to “kill us.”
He said the meeting came a cropper because he talked honestly about the need for security guarantees. “We just want to recognise the reality, the real situation.” He added that everybody is “afraid that Putin will come back tomorrow.”
Trump does not do well with reality; he tries to impose his own on the rest of us.
Zelenskiy said that Trump told him he wanted to be in “the middle” of the negotiations. But the Ukrainian president demurred: “I want really him to be more at our side” because “the war began when Russia brought this war to our country.”
About Ukrainians, he said: “They just want to hear that America on our side and America will stay with us, not with Russians.”
Seems simple. Unless Trump’s art of the deal is all about truckling to Putin.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
