For Americans who still cling to the now unfashionable notion that the international system should be ruled by rules and not might, Friday’s incident was a horror.
From the perspective of Europe, it's the beginning of the end of the Trans-Atlantic alliance...
Impossible to watch this video without shame at the abusive behavior of Trump/Vance to this heroic Ukrainian leader Zelensky. This Administration now an ally of Putin… a criminal thug and enemy of US and European values and democracy.
Friends, you have no idea what it’s like to be Ukrainian at this moment.
We’ve been through much harder things over the last 3 years and 4 days. But this is still a punch to the stomach like few others.
Thank you for your solidarity. Especially to those in the United States of America who don’t endorse this monster.
Thomas Friedman: “This Never Happened With an American President Before.”
What happened in the Oval Office on Friday — the obviously planned ambush of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance — was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.
Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it’s necessary to face it.
If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.
We see that there are real consequences to Trump’s admiration of and fascination with the world’s dictators, autocrats, and strongmen; that it’s not just a rhetorical preference. It’s become an actual foreign-policy direction for the country, which represents a radical shift in America’s postwar view of the world.
America’s abrupt turn from moral beacon and defender of the free world is unsurprising, given the fundamental immorality of the Trump administration. If you have the morality of a gangster, you will behave like a gangster.
In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied about it, giving Putin leverage over him…. The pattern of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, but it was extraordinarily damning….
Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous outcome in mind.
This week started with administration officials refusing to acknowledge that Russia started the war in Ukraine. It ends with a tense, shocking conversation in the Oval Office and whispers from the White House that they may try to end all U.S. support for Ukraine. I know foreign policy is not for the faint of heart, but right now, I am sick to my stomach as the administration appears to be walking away from our allies and embracing Putin, a threat to democracy and U.S. values around the world.
It is bewildering to see Mr. Trump’s allies defending this debacle as some show of American strength. The U.S. interest in Ukraine is shutting down Mr. Putin’s imperial project of reassembling a lost Soviet empire without U.S. soldiers ever having to fire a shot. That core interest hasn’t changed, but berating Ukraine in front of the entire world will make it harder to achieve.
Sometimes, I honestly wonder how Lindsey Graham’s face isn’t black and blue — from Trump’s balls constantly slapping him in the chin. Here’s hoping the ghost of John McCain tells his ex-little-buddy to go to hell. But of course, Lindsey Graham is already in a hell of his own making. The one in which he has to be the gold-plated phony that is himself.
Admiral James Stavridis, USN, Ret.:
There is a lot of nonsense commentary on the fact that President Zelensky wore his trademark informal combat gear to the White House. Here’s a snapshot of unarguably the greatest leader of the 20th century, Sir Winston Churchill, doing exactly the same on a visit to FDR.
