[Sundaycommunity] Fwd: An article from the Atlantic

[Catherine Walther]

>From my American sister-in-law. Excellent article. Catherine

This article was published today. It's about the meeting with zelensky and
Trump.

Friday, February 28, 2025

Tom Nichols
Staff writer
Today marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy.



Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which
President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the
spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an
enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not
obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of
the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon
make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation
fighting for its very existence.

Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting
America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this
shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in
Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this
meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking
points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of
it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and
give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to
do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end
on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of
all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence
during the meeting.

Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a
setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration,
with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics.
(The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon
Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other
Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio—in theory, America’s top
diplomat—was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance
pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.

Zelensky objected, as he should have, when the vice president castigated
the Ukrainian president for not showing enough personal gratitude to Trump.
And then in a moment of immense hypocrisy, Vance told Zelensky that it was
“disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate
this in front of the American media.” But baiting Zelensky into fighting in
front of the media was likely the plan all along, and Trump and Vance were
soon both yelling at Zelensky. (“This is going to be great television,”
Trump said during the meeting.) The president at times sounded like a Mafia
boss—“You don’t have the cards”; “you’re buried there”—but in the end, he
sounded like no one so much as Putin himself as he hollered about “gambling
with World War III,” as if starting the biggest war in Europe in nearly a
century was Zelensky’s idea.

After the meeting, Trump dismissed the Ukrainian leader and then issued a
statement that could only have pleased Moscow:

I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America
is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in
negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the
United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back
when he is ready for Peace.

Trump might as well have dictated this post on Truth Social before the
meeting, because Zelensky didn’t stand a chance of having an actual
discussion at the White House. When he showed Trump pictures of brutalized
Ukrainian soldiers, Trump shrugged. “That’s tough stuff,” he muttered.
Perhaps someone told Zelensky that Trump doesn’t read much, and reacts to
images, but Trump, uncharacteristically, seems to have been determined to
stay on message and pick a fight.

Vance, for his part, fully inhabited the role of a smarmy talk-show
sidekick, jumping in to make sure the star got the support he needed while
slamming one of the guests. The vice president is an unserious man who
tries to insert himself into serious moments, but this time the stakes were
much higher than the usual dustups with the media or congressional
Democrats. He chuckled as Brian Glenn, a journalist from the right-wing
channel Real America’s Voice who is reportedly dating Representative
Marjorie Taylor Greene, asked Zelensky the tough and incisive question of
why he had not worn a suit in the Oval Office. (Perhaps he’ll ask Musk why
he wore a hat and T-shirt to a Cabinet meeting, but I doubt it.)

The sheer rudeness shown to a foreign guest and friend of the United States
was (to use a word) deplorable as a matter of manners and grace, but worse,
Trump and Vance acted like a couple of online Kremlin sock puppets instead
of American leaders. They pushed talking points that they either knew or
should have known were wrong. Even if Zelensky were as fluent and capable
in English as Winston Churchill, he would never have been able to rebut the
flood of falsehoods. No, the U.S. has not given Ukraine $350 billion; yes,
Zelensky has repeatedly expressed his thanks to America and to Trump; no,
Zelensky was not attacking the administration. The Ukrainian leader did his
best to stand up to the bullying, but Trump and Vance were playing to the
cameras and the MAGA gallery at home.

Vance showed how dedicated he was to point-scoring rather than policy
making with an observation so shallow that he was lucky that Zelensky was
too off-balance to call him out for it. To emphasize Ukraine’s perilous
situation, Vance noted that Zelensky was sending conscripts to the front
lines, as if this was an unprecedented policy that only the most desperate
regime would dare enact. Zelensky said that all nations at war have
problems, but he might have pointed out to Vance that Ukraine is fighting
for its very existence, while the United States has dragged conscripts to
places far from home—including Korea and Vietnam—to fight against troops
supported by the Kremlin.

Today’s meeting and America’s shameful vote in the United Nations on Monday
confirmed that the United States is now aligned with Russia and against
Ukraine, Europe, and most of the planet. I felt physically sick watching
the president of the United States yell at a brave ally, fulminating in the
Oval Office as if he were an addled old man shaking his fist at a
television. Zelensky has endured tragedies, and risked his life, in ways
that men such as Trump and Vance cannot imagine. (Vance served as a
public-relations officer in the most powerful military in the world; he has
never had to huddle in a bunker during a Russian bombardment.) I am ashamed
for my nation; even if Congress acts to support and aid Ukraine, it cannot
restore the American honor lost today.

But no matter how disgusted anyone might be at Trump and Vance’s behavior,
the strategic reality is that this meeting is a catastrophe for the United
States and the free world. America’s alliances are now in danger, and
should be: Trump is openly, and gleefully, betraying everything America has
tried to defend since the defeat of the Axis 80 years ago. The entire
international order of peace and security is now in danger, as Russian
autocrats, after slaughtering innocent people for three years, look forward
to enjoying the spoils of their invasion instead of standing trial for
their crimes. (Shortly after Trump dismissed Zelensky from the White House,
Putin’s homunculus, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, posted on X:
“The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office.”)

Friday, February 28, 2025, will go into the history books as one of the
grimmest days in American diplomacy, the beginning of a long-term disaster
that every American, every U.S. ally, and anyone who cares about the future
of democracy will have to endure. With the White House’s betrayal of
Ukraine capping a month of authoritarian chaos in America, Putin, along
with other dictators around the world, can finally look at Trump with
confidence and think: one of us.
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