Just about everybody apart from the most extreme MAGA diehards seems to have been embarrassed by Trump and Vance's behavior this week—when they viciously berated and lectured President Zelensky of Ukraine while his country is fighting for its life. Even a few congressional Republicans finally broke their silence and offered a few words in criticism of Trump's style.
People still seem to be missing a key fact here, though. Even the people who are criticizing Trump still appear to believe that Zelensky somehow cost his country a worthwhile deal—that his personal "style" in some way upset Trump and tanked an otherwise valuable agreement. A friend shared a headline from Politico along these lines that read: "Zelensky Forgot the First Rule of Dealing With Trump."
But—no! Zelensky forgot nothing. I don't doubt for an instant that he knew exactly the risk he was taking by pushing back on Trump. But Zelensky had to do it anyway—because Trump was otherwise offering him nothing at all. It's not like Zelensky forfeited some worthwhile deal with the United States by confronting Trump's pro-Putin disinformation. There was no actual deal on the table to begin with.
What actually happened here is that Zelensky proposed a legitimate quid pro quo weeks ago. He recognized Trump's "transactional" character (as the news media euphemistically calls it). He recognized that Trump is a self-interested egomaniac, is another way to put it. And so, he and his negotiators proposed an actual deal: mineral rights in exchange for security guarantees.
To which Trump came back with a counter-offer: in effect, "how about we take all of your mineral rights, and then some, and in exchange we give you—nothing at all!" That was the actual deal on the table. Trump invited Zelensky to the Oval Office to sign an agreement that provided no security guarantees of any kind to Ukraine. So Zelensky had nothing to lose by challenging Trump.
The myth of Trump as the great "negotiator" and "deal-maker" is of course one that he has assiduously fostered for decades—with the help of reality TV producers and ghost writers, who now deeply regret the role they played (unwittingly) in creating a monster. But in reality, Trump does not know the first thing about negotiation—which is that it has to be in some way reciprocal.
Trump's notion of "deal-making" is actually more like a mugging. It is: how about I take all of your things, and give you nothing in return. People sometimes criticized Trump's mineral rights proposal to Ukraine as "extortion" or a "protection racket"—but even that is too generous to what he did here. After all: even blackmail implies some basic quid pro quo. What Trump proposed here was simple theft.
Trump's "art of the deal" here was the same as that of Monsieur Ubu—in Alfred Jarry's immortal portrayal of that monster of egotistical appetites and mediocrity and philistinism. Jarry's protagonist, as I summarized in a blog a few years back, is "utterly lacking in even the most crassly self-interested understanding of reciprocity and mutuality[.]"
That's what this episode reveals about Trump's character too. It wasn't that he traded "protection" for someone's wallet. It wasn't "your money or your life." It was—your money and your life.
Trump's approach to negotiation is nothing more than sheer infantile narcissism. To quote the poet John Davidson, in describing the little devil of greed in all of us (which most of us learn to suppress in favor of the "reality principle," as we age, but that Trump never did): "If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,/ He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all."
That's what really happened here. That's Trump's character. He's not just "transactional." He's not just practicing a "protection racket." Both of those would imply that, while he drives a hard bargain, he was at least willing to offer something in exchange for the wealth he had extorted. But that's simply not the case here. The U.S. was offering no long-term support in return for Ukraine's wealth.
So, I suspect Zelensky saw his Oval Office meeting as his last possible chance to make a push for U.S. security guarantees. I'm sure he realized Trump was unlikely to agree. But he had nothing to lose. Trump's version of the mineral rights deal was not worth the paper it was printed on, in terms of Ukraine's interests. So Zelensky had to push back.
Trump and Vance's response was predictably bullying and snot-nosed. Vance berated him for not being grateful like the little sycophantic courtier Vance is. Trump gladly seized on the opportunity to abandon the whole deal. I suspect this is what both men wanted all along. They were looking for a pretext to sell out Ukraine—and now they have it.
Trump and Vance want to pretend like they were willing to offer Ukraine something. Vance was plainly sitting forward in his seat, eager for the chance to pounce, so that he could torpedo the deal himself, and then he and Trump could both pretend: "see, Ukraine walked away from a perfectly good deal—it was all Zelensky's doing." But this is a lie; there was never any deal to start with.
Unfortunately, the media is playing into their hands. Even though everyone is criticizing Trump; even though everyone recognizes how embarrassing the spectacle in the White House really was—they are still putting forward the false narrative that Zelensky somehow walked away from a deal. He really didn't. He walked away from a stick-up. And rightly so.
The administration had already completely sold out Ukraine's interests long before the Oval Office meeting. Zelensky forfeited nothing. And maybe he damaged his relationship with Trump even further by refusing to grovel and crawl before him—by refusing to sit by silently while Trump told lies and insults about his nation while it is fighting for its life against aggression.
But Zelensky had nothing to lose, at this point, by seeing that relationship deteriorate even further. Trump was never actually offering him anything. Vance has said time and again he does not actually want to support Ukraine at all. So the best Zelensky could do was to try to challenge both men's falsehoods on air and take his argument to the American people—in which effort, he succeeded.
Vance—who could not survive a single day or hour in a country under invasion, where he actually had to fear for his life—despises actual strength and courage when he sees it—because it reminds him of what a pathetic coward and opportunistic creep he himself actually is. So of course he was itching for the chance to generate a scene that would then create the false impression: "Ukraine walked away from a deal."
But Zelensky actually won that round—as true courage and strength always will, in the face of sham bravado of the sort Vance offers. By "blowing up the deal," which was no deal at all, he in fact forfeited nothing. And by challenging Trump and Vance to their faces—he revealed to the world and the TV-watching public exactly what creeps they have empowered to high office.
Zelensky revealed all over again—since apparently it still wasn't clear to others—that Trump is the grossest sort of bully imaginable. Though—judging from the signs at CPAC—much of MAGA still worships Trump as a kind of God, he is the "God" of the sort Isaac Rosenberg once depicted in a great poem—a petty, bullying, disgusting tyrant, in short. A kind of presidential Jabba the Hutt:
In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,[....]
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls. [...]
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
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