I want to reiterate something: Donald Trump has been plotting his revenge against Volodymyr Zelensky ever since 2019, when Trump was impeached for trying to extort dirt on Joe Biden from Zelensky.
Trump is not especially pro-Putin on Ukraine and never has been. But he hates Zelensky, and he's happy to let Putin carve up Ukraine as a simple act of vengeance.
Zelensky's fate was settled five years ago. He just didn't know it. Trump must be chortling today over his Oval Office shouting match, designed for maximum humiliation of a guy he's been conniving against for a long time.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/02/trump-ukraine-russia/681851/
"Applebaum: So I would go farther. I mean, Trump has been talking about his disdain for allies and alliances since the 1980s. In 1987, notoriously, he took out these huge newspaper ads, after a trip to Moscow, I should say, saying that alliances were a waste of money, and we shouldn’t, you know—at that time, Japan, people were particularly worried about. During his first term, he repeatedly looked uncomfortable with allies, attacked them, disparaged them, famously wanted to leave NATO. He told John Bolton that he wanted to leave NATO, on the way to a NATO summit. And he was talked down by Bolton and by Jim Mattis and by others. So in that sense, it’s nothing new."
Yes, our alliances have been one of post-war America's most robust national defense assets.
Trump has always thought alliances are for "suckers."
And yet Biden and this Russian aggression actually brought a few more hesitant Nordic countries into the fold, NATO is as strong as ever, and Russia weakened and humiliated, as long as Trump doesn't mess it all up (though in any case am convinced Europe has woke up to not just being our wing man anymore, so they are stronger and more united than ever too).
Of course, these are side developments as far as the Ukraine invasion has gone, which is really about their will and fight to defend their freedom, self-determination, homes and country.
Kevin I am glad you are feeling better, but did you not hear Trump's rant about how much poor Vlady suffered because of the phony Russia witch hunt hunter biden crooked hilary laptop email shady shumer?
The guy loves Putin and hates America. Why every right wing politician is so eager to help him in his question to elevate Putin and destroy America I genuinely don't know. But for Trump this is straight from the heart.
trump would have sent the appropriated javelins to ukraine during his first term had zelenskyy had given him some dirt on biden.
They were eventually sent no? but not before trying to extort him
Uh...Zelensky was not the one humiliated by that exchange. That was a Trump/Vance self-inflicted wound, as shown by the hurried double-think tweets his cabinet members were forced to put out to try to contain the damage.
Nah, I think he's genuinely eager and desperate for Putin's approval. He started rambling about how both he and Putin had had such a hard time, been subject to witch hunts, etc, etc. We also just got reports that US intelligence services were basically told to downplay or ignore Russian cyber-threats now.
Although I do think they were planning to put Zelenskyy on the spot in a trap interview, and try to force him into public subjugation.
Yeah, I think Kevin's papering over Trump's pro-Putin (really, pro dictator) tendencies. I agree with him that Trump's animus toward.Zelensky is primarily driven by the long-standing grudge he has held because of the Hunter Biden issue. But Trump seems genuinely enamored of Putin. Both things can be true.
This wasn't a meeting to discuss anything. It was a meeting to force Zelensky to kiss the ring. That and to rag on his predecessors and betters. It was an embarrassing display of vanity and arrogance on Trumps part, and an equally embarrassing display of sycophancy on Vances part. Jesus what a fucking pair of douchebags.
It was a "meeting" at all. It was an ambush.
This is exactly it. With the value added of revenge, rescuing Putin from near collapse, meat to the base, centering himself in global attention, etc etc.
I do not like to say things like this, because people are going to get hurt, but the best thing for this country is for Trump and Trumpistan to keep on their chosen path, and get worse. I do not see any other durable way out for the U.S., where under the guise of 'conservatism' over the past sixty years a relatively liberal democracy has been put in an ever tightening chokehold by an evolving series of increasingly radical reactionaries and increasingly autocratic anti-democratic forces. The ideas, mores, laws, standards we consider the greatest strengths of democratic society have been subverted and weaponized on a decadal scale by increasingly malevolent forces that have predictably emerged from a core primate level of understanding of the world, where the alpha signals stability and safety within a regime of total or near total control. We are a "primitive" society (as per primate research), with an archaic Constitution modeled on this, and we are predictably acting as such. The only way out is for the alpha (and associated) to overreach to the point of existentially threatening the group.
Modern American 'conservatism' is not salvageable. Everyone who can see knows this. But it will not 'die' until it has done irreversible damage to and/or existentially threatens the social fabric to the point that the threat has been removed, after which the system will have to be reconstructed. I do not know what this looks like; I'm sure there are folks who understand these things and have the tools to make it happen.
We cannot return to the world before Trump. The fundamental assumptions of American politics - offsetting and relatively benign cycles of political influence, a Constitutional order, a shared sense of decency and respect, the rule of law as we've known it, everything - are out the window. They were before Trump, but people were able to ignore it. Not anymore. And anyone - anyone - who advocates or gestures towards the idea that Trump and Trumpistan are just a temporary aberration of a fundamentally sound system is showing a profound inability to grasp our obvious and shared reality, and must be treated as such.
Addendum: piling on here that Trump most certainly identifies with Putin. Liberal democracy is the enemy; strong alpha males are the allies. Especially 'aggrieved' strong alpha males. They're the victims, right? 'Conservatives' are the victims of "woke" Democrats, right?
This is going to take a lot more than ten years of electoral wins to reverse. A lot more.
I can't bring myself to watch this, but I got to know, does this make Trump look so bad that the sliver of the electorate that voted for Trump, but can be persuaded to turn against him - will it make any of them actually start vocally demanding congress do more to stop him? (I guess you can add the people that didn't vote to the list of people I hope get activated by this.)
I don't care how it looks to you, or me, or Kevin, or pundits. I care how it looks to people that believe Democrats were putting foreigners ahead of Americans. In other words, how does it look to people that actually believed Trump was going to change something real and didn't know that was a completely fake issue.
This, of course, assumes the Dems figure out how to talk about it and manage to get their message out. The 2 things they are worse at than every other group in the world.
I doubt any of those voters' minds will be changed by episodes like this. But if the prices of gas and eggs don't come down ....
Kevin says "Trump is not especially pro-Putin on Ukraine and never has been."
I think Jonathan Chait of the Atlantic would not agree:
The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky
He simply likes Vladimir Putin better.
By Jonathan Chait
Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event.
Then Trump explained just why he deemed such an event so unlikely. “They respect me,” he thundered. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”
Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party.
If Trump really wants to bring peace, he needs to stop saying he told everyone so, that the war never would have happened if he were president, that our previous president was a failure who only "beat his chest", that Ukraine has no chance without him, that Zelensky is a dictator, and that Ukraine started this invasion of their own homeland.
Revenge and retribution are the motivating emotions for Trump and almost all of the MAGA movement.
But Kevin is wrong to state or imply that Trump is not 'especially' pro-Putin. It's a qualifier that is both wrong and not necessary to point out that Revenge is a motivating factor.
I just don't see this as revenge.
First, in the earlier bits of this meeting (for which, not many outlets have kept this section of the video), Trump and Zelensky were very chummy, smiling and laughing. He ain't that good of an actor, not even by a mile. You want us to believe that he was always going to argue with Zelensky not 15 minutes later, just so that he could use it as an excuse to not get the very deal he championed?
Second, Trump is an idiot and he just wanted to find a way out of this war that he promised would be so easy to end. Shaming Zelensky is what he does to anyone who he thinks has better appeal to people.
This was premeditated by Vance. People should be outraged that a lower-level representative would do a dressing down of a country's leader in front of cameras. He did this on purpose, breaking every diplomatic protocol and norm, to push his bullshit, hoping to trigger Zelensky to respond.
It was that response -- a mild pushback at most -- that then gave Vance the window to make his ultimate move to pull Trump in by appealing to his vanity. And it worked. Vance has always wanted to stop funding Ukraine, even from the start. And he suckered Trump into flashing a red-face while he went off on a childish tirade that made no sense.
There's even a brief moment where you can see Trump red-faced angry, Zelensky looking dejected, and Vance slipping a split second smile as he looked away.