Group Activity The Full, Unedited Trump, Zelenskyy, and Vance Video

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32 Responses

  1. Michael Siegel
    Ignored
    says:

    I’ve been toying with an editorial but it’s hard to write about this without getting incandescent with rage. Absolutely shameful display by POTUS and VPOTUS.Report

  2. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    Twitter had several observations on this but the ones I thought were interesting touched on:

    Look at Zelenskyy’s relationship with his nose. It’s downright Zizekian. One theory I saw said that Trump, a hardcore teetotal kinda guy, knows enough about cocaine to have timed Zelenskyy’s come-down with this meeting and so he knew that Zelenskyy would blow it up.

    Another talked about Trump’s use of the phrase “you don’t have any cards” and how that idiom doesn’t translate well. Trump was saying something much like “you’ve got a crappy hand that you don’t want to have called” and Zelenskyy heard “you haven’t been dealt into the game”. The phrase that would have made sense to Zelenskyy would be something like “you don’t have any trump cards” (no pun intended) and that would have caused a lot less static.

    The messaging needs to be, shall we say, massaged. The arguments for why we need to be sending Ukraine more aid are not as obvious as the ones making these arguments seem to think and many have been undercut by previous arguments.

    Putin is Hitler? I thought Trump was Hitler. Is the argument that Trump should be like FDR and not Hitler? Because FDR would *NEVER* hand over eastern Europe to Russia?

    “It is in the US’s best interest that Russia lose. This isn’t about Ukraine at all. Ukraine is just a cat’s paw.” This strikes me as a pretty good argument insofar as it seems to involve telling the truth and having some shared reality to draw upon. A heck of a lot better than the moral one that seems to rely on moral claims that are, shall we say, not universally shared.Report

    • InMD in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      I think it’s part ‘it’s in the US’s interest for Russia to lose’ and part ‘peace cannot be secured by weakness but only by strength.’ That doesn’t mean we support Ukraine’s most maximalist aims down to the last cent but it does mean a settlement that fails to account for the long term isn’t a settlement at all.

      Trump’s instinct to end the conflict isn’t wrong, it’s that his methods of doing so are unlikely to succeed and may ultimately put the US in an even worse position down the road.Report

    • Ozzzy! in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      I think we are historically somewhere between Hardin’s Anacreon Gambit (Religion / Cultural assimilation holds factions together) and Mallow’s Korellian Defense (geopoltical disputes are resolved by economics and technology needs in the medium run). YMMV.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Ozzzy!
        Ignored
        says:

        I don’t know what’s breaking, quite honestly.

        It feels like the whole Whigs going away.

        But I don’t know if the Whigs went away because they lost or if they went away because they won so completely that they were superfluous.Report

        • Arpa in reply to Jaybird
          Ignored
          says:

          We have the chess club and the football players, versus the yearbook staff and the theater kids. The yearbook staff and the theater kids thought they could exploit divisions between the chess club (geeks!) and the jocks, forever. Turns out that’s not the case.Report

    • Philip H in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      Is it right or wrong to reward Putin for invading Ukraine?Report

    • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      Some people may be confused about Jaybird’s stupid conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian president is a cocaine addict.

      There’s a simple explanation of why he believes that, and that is that he has direct access to dumb conspiracy theories piped into his head.

      But for those who wish to know the origin of his wrongness, feel free to Google ‘Zelenskyy cocaine’, where you will learn that it was a doctored video. Multiple doctored videos, in fact, probably as part of deliberate Russian misinformation.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC
        Ignored
        says:

        I didn’t call him a cocaine addict. There were clips of Zelenskyy doing the Chuck Barris nose scratch thing while talking over the hour.

        I googled “Zelenskyy cocaine” and got articles going back to 2022 from websites I didn’t want to click on. My theory had nothing to do with those. The theory, instead, had to do with tiktoks that just put a compilation of all of the times Zelenskyy scratched his nose during the press conference.

        Hey, maybe it’s allergies! I spent yesterday sneezing and, even this morning, I woke up with itchy eyes and blowing my nose every 40 seconds. And I don’t know that I’ve ever been in the same room as cocaine. (Weed? Yes. Cocaine? Not really my circle’s thing.)

        It was more of a commentary of the nose scratching thing and the being crabby enough to blow the deal up thing.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      Twitter is filled with Elmo’s reactionary fanboys.Report

  3. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    Harry Enten is the host of CNN’s “Margin of Error” podcast. He ran the numbers on the Ukraine/Russia thing and:

    -Trump’s net approval on Russia/Ukraine (+2) is far more positive than Biden’s was by the end (-22).
    -The share (31% to 50%) who want a compromise in the war is way up
    -The share who say Russia is an enemy is way down (64% to 34%).

    Not that democracy is any way to resolve moral questions, but this is a pretty tough row to hoe.Report

  4. DensityDuck
    Ignored
    says:

    In 2022 I said “the endgame for this is that Russia gets the land bridge to Crimea that was their original goal, and the rest of the fighting is just about exactly how much of a salient there will be in Northeastern Ukraine”, and nothing about that has changed so far, and nothing about it seems like it’s going to short of Ukraine somehow generating a Clone Army.Report

  5. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    Volodymyr Zelenskyy has tweeted:

    I would like to reiterate Ukraine’s commitment to peace.

    None of us wants an endless war. Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians. My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.

    We are ready to work fast to end the war, and the first stages could be the release of prisoners and truce in the sky — ban on missiles, long-ranged drones, bombs on energy and other civilian infrastructure — and truce in the sea immediately, if Russia will do the same. Then we want to move very fast through all next stages and to work with the US to agree a strong final deal.

    We do really value how much America has done to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty and independence. And we remember the moment when things changed when President Trump provided Ukraine with Javelins. We are grateful for this.

    Our meeting in Washington, at the White House on Friday, did not go the way it was supposed to be. It is regrettable that it happened this way. It is time to make things right. We would like future cooperation and communication to be constructive.

    Regarding the agreement on minerals and security, Ukraine is ready to sign it in any time and in any convenient format. We see this agreement as a step toward greater security and solid security guarantees, and I truly hope it will work effectively.

    Report

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