This writer’s views on the conduct of the American President and Vice President towards their Ukrainian counterpart on Friday evening will not come as a surprise to anybody who follows me on social media: I thought, and think, that it was amongst the lowest of the countless low moments of Donald Trump’s period in political life.
There are many reasons that I think that, but the most important one for me is that it was the behaviour of a cheap bully.
It is true that the United States holds many, if not quite all, the cards in the US-Ukraine relationship. Mr. Zelensky came to Washington as a supplicant, a modern version of the feudal vassal seeking aid from his overlord.
That is essentially what Laura writes this morning in the companion piece to this one, and indeed it has been the tone of much right-wing commentary that wants to blame Zelensky without explicitly excusing Trump. It effectively amounts to “Zelensky should have dealt with Trump better, sat there and eaten his humble pie, and asked for some more at the end”.
Much of that commentary is an admission of a simple reality: That the President of the United States is a bully, who admires other bullies, and likes bullying those weaker than him. When they stand up to him, he reacts badly.
This is not a secret. It is all there, in Mr. Trump’s public actions and statements. He admires the “very strong” leader of North Korea for “keeping his people in line”, appearing almost to admire that state’s system of starvation as policy and concentration camps for the dissidents. He says the same of China. He admires the “very tough” President-for-Life of Russia.
Indeed, if you want to understand Donald Trump’s unshakable commitment to Israel, don’t think about it in ideological terms. Mr. Trump has no particular fondness for Israel, but Benjamin Netanyahu is the classic “tough” leader, and the classic “dealmaker” (Netanyahu has stayed in power for decades now, with only brief interruptions, through a willingness to make deals with literally anyone to stay in office).
I promise you: At the first sign of “weakness” from an Israeli Prime Minister, you could expect very public Oval Office ponderings about the strength and great toughness of the Mullahs in Tehran. Others support Israel because it is a beacon of democracy in an ocean of detestable Middle Eastern Regimes. Mr. Trump openly admires it because it bombs military opponents weaker than itself.
Mr. Trump scorns the weak. If you cannot see that this is central to his character, then you do not understand him at all.
And what have you in Zelensky? The leader of an objectively weak country that shows something that Mr. Trump has never shown, not once, in the entirety of his public life: Moral courage. In Trump’s view of the world, the natural order is that the weak submit to the strong, not that they stand up to the strong. It is why he appears so baffled, for example, that Denmark does not simply want to give him Greenland. And it is I think a key reason he is so disdainful of Europe’s defence spending.
That is also, evidently, why so many MAGA types are instinctively unbothered by Trump’s interference last week to get the Tate brothers released from Romania. Yes, Andrew Tate might brag about beating women and making them cry during sex, but on one level that is just the natural order of things, right? Tate is strong and dominant, and is therefore excused from the requirement to be anything other than strong and dominant. You might not approve of his conduct, exactly, but in the moral framework that Donald Trump sets for his adherents, it is worthy of nothing more than a shrug.
This is the entirety of the political ideology of Donald Trump’s foreign and domestic policy: Tariffs for example are not an economic tool so much as they are a political tool. Or, in the words of his fans, a “negotiating tactic”, with the negotiation being “we will wreck your economy unless you submit”.
Any concession at all – however weak and symbolic that concession, like Mexico sending a single infantry division to the US border in return for the cancellation of tariffs – is taken as proof positive that the strongman has won again, and that “toughness” is what works. The actual results are less important than how the show appears to the viewers. The thrill is not the outcome, but the action: Once the knee has been bent to Trump, honour is satisfied. That is the entirety of the Trump ideology, and central to its appeal to his millions of fans.
It is why the Trump show produces so many objectively hilarious moments, like Keir Starmer publicly telling Trump last week that King Charles was a close personal friend and admirer of the US President. Everybody with a brain knows that to be untrue, but everybody with a brain also knows that it’s the kind of thing that Trump values above all else, so Starmer delivered it.
And so, into the frame comes Vlodymyr Zelensky: He was in Washington to sign what Trump brags is a great deal for the United States. The purpose of the visit was so that Trump could tout American access to Ukraine’s minerals in payment for money that Ukraine has never actually received. Ukraine was ready to sign that deal to end the war, in return for American guarantees of Ukrainian security, which Trump simply will not provide.
And so, Zelensky said “no”.
Vlodymyr Zelensky has now said “no” firmly to both Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin, and demonstrated a refusal to submit to other people’s interpretations of his country’s best interests in relation to both leaders.
His crime, in the eyes of Trump, was not saying “no”, but saying “no” while weak. Benjamin Netanyahu has said “no” to the Americans more times than you have had steak dinners, but Benjamin Netanyahu is “strong” and therefore can be forgiven. Zelensky’s crime was to be a supplicant who acted like an equal.
It is true that young Ukrainian men are paying the price for Zelensky’s policy, in many cases with their lives. It is also true that young Russian men are paying the price for Vladimir Putin’s policy, in many cases with their lives. Indeed, young North Korean men are dying on the fields of Eastern Ukraine in service to Vladimir Putin’s policies.
Only one set of deaths, though, matters to those who profess to want to “stop the killing”. After all, young Russian men dying in their thousands to fight a war in Ukraine is proof of Russian strength, but young Ukrainians dying in the same cause is proof of hopelessness and weakness. That is why your average MAGA tweeter has so little to say about Russian casualties.
In the last month, Donald Trump has ludicrously labelled the Ukrainian leader a dictator, something he would never say about his Russian counterpart who has rigged every Russian election for nearly three decades and been in power longer than William the Conqueror. He has pretended that Ukraine started the war, and dragged the Americans into it. He has openly lied about the scale of US support for Ukraine. Before he came into office, he bragged that he could end the war with a single phonecall, in 24 hours. That, too, was a lie.
The most telling moment of Friday’s shitshow, I thought, was the whining from JD Vance that Zelensky has “never even said thank you”.
First, he has: On literally dozens of occasions, including in an address to the US Congress.
Second, it is the classic behaviour of a bully and an abuser. It is the language of the schoolyard strongman who demands his victim be grateful for a wedgie.
Third, it revealed the whole dynamic: Zelensky was there, not as a leader in his own right, but as a prop for the Trump show. He was to sign away his country’s economic assets and thank Daddy Donald for the privilege. His daring to contradict the great leader in public was what proved so “tremendously disrespectful”. You do not go into the Godfather’s house and question him on his daughter’s wedding day.
It may well prove, in time, that Zelensky’s moral courage will be the ruination of his country. None of us can predict the future. Perhaps the so-called “realists” will finally be right, having been wrong about the course of the Russia-Ukraine war for three years to date.
But if you were teaching your children which of these men you would rather they grew up to be like, would you rather it was the wartime leader who puts the interests of his own country first, even in the face of two of the world’s great powers, or would it be the slobbering bore who praises North Korea and thinks Andrew Tate is getting a hard time?
My answer to that is clear. Yours may differ.