We need to recall the entire press conference as it unfolded, all the ebbs and flows of engagement and insult. Trump was on his best behaviour for the guts of an hour, an almost unprecedented achievement by his own low standards. Really, he’s intent from the onset on doing the schmooze, so we can discard at once the idea that this was a fully premeditated attempted hijack, as if this were the case it would have been launched much earlier. You can actually see the mutual rankling develop in real time. For forty minutes all is going well but look at the set up here. Reporters are asking multiple off topic questions icing Zelensky (Europe and censorship, really?).
Trump does his campaign stump rehearsing the Russian hoax meme saying poor Vlad “suffered” from collusion allegations! Certainly, the man who openly assassinates his media critics on European soil, locks up and liquidates Navalny, kidnaps Ukrainian children, breaks every prior peace accord with Ukraine brokered by Merkel & Macron ….and Trump equalises THEM … the aggressor and the victim, the propagandist and the hero who stayed in Kiev while Russian tanks circled the city. Vladimir “suffered” from the idea that people thought he might have aided Trump in the 2016 election? This guy, the delusional autocrat who’s attempting to recreate the Russian Empire, the stone cold killer who will create a mountain of corpses to retrieve the territory stolen by Catherine the Great and ‘given away’ by Gorbachev is “upset” about the accusations of Russian collusion with a Republican presidential campaign in the American press? Is Trump completely deluded or is he just pretending to be a vacuous grifter shilling out of his depth?
Trump approaches this like it’s a boardroom ratings drama on the Apprentice where he’s solemn and impartial arbiter between co-equals squabbling over a piece of real estate …as though history and identity, democracy and autocracy, aggressor and victim, law and order, the blatant transgressions …were immaterial nothings. All that matters is The Deal, the first thing he talked about. Zelensky had to pull out and physically present the pictures of torture victims to slow down his stump speeching. Then, contrary to all actual decency, Zelensky is basically demanded to explain by some snotty White House staffer (Marjorie Taylor Greens boyfriend apparently) why he shows such disrespect to the Oval Office by not wearing a suit? I mean, this is what kicked Vance off; “you haven’t said thanks once”! So the suit jibe coming from the sidelines is not the type of direct insult you throw at a visiting head of state minutes before signing a crucial deal that could avert World War Three (in Trumps carefully chosen dramatically framing words). It seems instead to have been a Vance led hijacking, nothing to do with Trump, but carefully constructed nevertheless to chime with his master’s wishes. Vance presumably picked up on Zelensky’s body language, realised the talks would go nowhere and made a power play to trigger Trump into going full on gorilla mode.
Vance belongs to an inner White House clutch that may be broadly categorised as pro-Russian, as opposed to Rubio for instance, who has an entire back catalogue of anti-Putin speeches delivered from the senate floor. Nevertheless, all the arrogance on display here is simply stomach churning. Zelensky had been effusive in his gratitude all along but never wavered on his simple wish to have a security guarantee in place. Earlier, Trump was insisting that the US gave “so much more” than Europe. A lie. Zelensky is twitching at all of this. That the figure was 350 billion. A lie. That the conflict kicked off in 2015. Not a lie, just Trump’s ignorance which demonstrates he has no real understanding of the sequence of events or the conflict itself, viewing it solely through the prism of his own interests, which is a complete disaster for the world unless someone can talk some sense into him.
Trump desperately wants this deal done; the photo ops, rubbing shoulders with Putin, Nobel Peace Prize and vindication of the simplistic boast that “I alone can fix it”, “it would never have happened on my watch” etc. He won the election so he must be right? Wrong, it’s an idle boast transmuted in his mind into an unassailable truth for which he receives no pushback because he’s surrounded himself with noddies. Intelligent and capable in their own right but too stitched into the weave now to confront him with a dose of reality. This is why he’s fatally unfit for office; he’s incapable of empathising with the brutalised Ukrainians, his grandiosity blinds him to reality and his litmus test for “advisors” is subordination not independent thought. Afterwards, I listened to Kira Rudic, an opposition party leader in Ukraine who announced that she and her party are 100% behind Zelensky in terms of his negotiating stance in dealing with the US and Europe and his continued firm opposition to Russian aggression. Europe too, has unsurprisingly rallied behind Zelensky, immediately inviting him to headline multiple strategic conferences. So, if this was a “set-up” or simply tempers flaring as their respective positions are so polarised, the net result of the whole campaign to discredit Zelensky by both Trump himself and the various media organs of MAGA; the whole effort has backfired spectacularly.
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