“This is going to be great television” quipped President Trump as his disastrous meeting with Ukraine’s Zelensky, VP Vance, and others ended.
The Guardian has a transcript of some of the heated bits here:
Zelenskyy: What kind of diplomacy, JD, are you are asking about? What do you mean?
Vance: I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country.
Zelenskyy: Yes, but if you …
Vance: Mr President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the frontlines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president.
Zelenskyy: Have you ever been to Ukraine to see the problems we have?
Vance: I’ve actually watched and seen the stories, and I know what happens is you bring people on a propaganda tour, Mr President.
Do you disagree that you’ve had problems with bringing people in your military, and do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
Zelenskyy: First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. You have nice ocean and don’t feel [it] now, but you will feel it in the future.
Trump: You don’t know that. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.
Zelenskyy: I am not telling you, I am answering …
two men argue while seated
Ukraine ‘gambling with world war three’, Trump tells Zelenskyy in fiery meeting
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Vance: That’s exactly what you’re doing …Trump, raising his voice: You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel. We’re going to feel very good and very strong.
Zelenskyy tries to speak.
Trump: You right now are not in a very good position. You’ve allowed yourself to be in a very bad position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having the cards.
You’re gambling with lives of millions of people, you’re gambling with world war three and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to this country.
Vance: Have you said thank you once?
Zelenskyy: A lot of times.
Vance: No, in this meeting, this entire meeting? Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country.
Zelenskyy: Yes, you think that if you will speak very loudly about the war …
Trump: He’s not speaking loud. Your country is in big trouble. No, no, you’ve done a lot of talking. Your country is in big trouble.
Zelenskyy: I know, I know.
Trump: You’re not winning this. You have a damn good chance of coming out OK, because of us.
Zelenskyy: We are staying strong from the very beginning of the war, we have been alone, and we are saying, I said, thanks.
Trump, speaking over Zelenskyy: You haven’t been alone … We gave you military equipment. Your men are brave, but they had our military. If you didn’t have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks.
Zelenskyy: I heard it from Putin in three days.
Trump: It’s going to be a very hard thing to do business like this.
Vance: Just say thank you.
Zelenskyy: I said it a lot of times.
Vance: Accept that there are disagreements and let’s go litigate those disagreements rather than trying to fight it in the American media, when you’re wrong. We know that you’re wrong.
Trump: You’re buried there. Your people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers. No, listen … And then you tell us, ‘I don’t want a ceasefire. I don’t want a ceasefire. I want to go and I want this.’
Trump: You’re not acting at all thankful. And that’s not a nice thing. I’ll be honest, that’s not a nice thing.
All right, I think we’ve seen enough. What do you think? Great television. I will say that.
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
“Peace for our time.”Report
I don’t think that comparison is fair to Chamberlain. He had legitimate concerns that the British Empire wouldn’t survive another World War. also, he wasn’t on Hitler’s side.Report
As it turned out, it didn’t, or at least not for long. And, also as it turned out, he unintentionally was.Report
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
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
Putin did so well adhering to all the other agreements he made about Ukraine he can surly be trusted to adhere to this one.Report
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
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
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
Is it right or wrong to reward Putin for invading Ukraine?Report
Oh, I know this one! It’s morally wrong!
To what extent should we insist on a moral president that does moral things all the moral time?
(Note: This is a trick question.)Report
If it’s morally wrong then what’s there to argue about? We as a nation have aided and abetted enough moral wrongs that we should really get in the habit of aiding and abetting the moral rights. Unless you prefer immorality with your coffee.Report
The price, of course.
We can always argue about the price.Report
Come back to me when we exceed the $1 Trillion we wasted in Iraq.Report
Wasted? How dare you! Saddam was worse than Hitler!Report
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
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
Brother, if it’s gonna be drugs, I think I’d rather go with coke (and get the Eighties) than Ketamine (and get the Twenties).Report
Twitter is filled with Elmo’s reactionary fanboys.Report
You’d be better off sticking with BlueSky and avoiding bias, then.Report
Harry Enten is the host of CNN’s “Margin of Error” podcast. He ran the numbers on the Ukraine/Russia thing and:
Not that democracy is any way to resolve moral questions, but this is a pretty tough row to hoe.Report
The cult falls in line.Report
Looking at the Biden numbers, I’d say that they were in line back before Trump.Report
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
It’s worse than you think. Every time America gives Ukraine a longer range missile, Russia expands “How Much Land We Need for Security’s Sake” (roughly “the longest missile range” plus 20 miles).
Either America “takes away Ukraine’s toys” or Ukraine isn’t getting much of the land back.Report
Russia doesn’t intend to give any of it back. I suspect they also intend to keep going eventually. This doesn’t in in Ukraine unless we let it.Report
What happens when they want to link up Kaliningrad?Report
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has tweeted:
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I wonder if he was wearing a suit while he typed that.Report
He didn’t type that. He was busy yelling and throwing things.
His assistant was probably wearing a suit when he typed that, though.Report