After Friday’s red carpet love-in with Russian president Vladimir Putin, President Trump sat down with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky today at the Oval Office to talk peace and the world hoped it would go better than the last White House meeting between the U.S. and Ukraine.
Before meeting with Zelensky, or any other world leaders in town for the event, Trump was already telling reporters that peace could come “almost immediately” if Zelensky ditched NATO and gifted Putin Crimea - the diplomatic equivalent of telling someone to end a mugging by handing over their wallet and the deed to their house.
Zelensky, of course, is a man in the awkward position of being the democratically elected leader of the country Trump’s friend is currently trying to dismantle. And the body language of today’s meeting told its own story: gone were the grinning asides and admiring jokes, replaced with the brittle civility of a man forced to pose with the victim while still swooning over the perpetrator.
Zelensky, perched on the edge of his seat while Trump leaned back, opened by thanking Trump for arranging the meeting. Inevitably, he wore a suit rather than his signature military fatigues. Anyone who witnessed the horror of their last Oval Office encounter will recall how he was repeatedly chided by the president, J.D. Vance and far-right reporter Brian Glenn for not “suiting up.”
Zelensky was also criticized for not being “grateful” enough — which explains why today he began by thanking Trump for arranging the meeting.
Luckily for Zelensky and unluckily for the rest of us, it became clear that Trump wasn’t going to do a repeat performance of February’s attack — because he had other things on his mind anyway. Questions from the gathered media were direct: “Is today’s meeting ‘deal or no deal?’” asked one.
Trump equivocated. “I can never say that.” What could he say, then? Well, it soon became unfortunately apparent.
“This isn’t my war, this is Joe Biden’s war. He’s the one who —” There was a pause, where it seemed like the president was genuinely about to suggest that Biden started the war in Ukraine himself, before he ended up at “—had a lot to do with that happening.” No mention of Putin, of course. I mean, why would there be?
And then it went on. And on, and on, and on. Asked directly about what was happening in Ukraine, Trump would wheel out an irritated, detail-free “We’re going to have lasting peace,” before going right back to his own agenda.
“I used to get great publicity. Now I get the worst publicity that anyone’s ever had in office,” he said, after an unconnected question. Moments later, apropos nothing: “Joe Biden’s a very corrupt politician — not a smart man, by the way. Go back 40 years and he wasn’t smart then, either.”
This tirade continued for a while, took a left turn into how the 2020 election was supposedly stolen from him, and ended with a Biden jab: “He was a horrible, corrupt president!” Zelensky had only minutes before been talking about a one-and-a-half-year-old child who had just been killed in Kharkiv by Russian missiles.
And Trump continued on. He was going to end “corrupt” mail-in ballots and “the machines” (never mind the defamation lawsuits already lost by right-wing media spreading conspiracy theories about voting machines giving inaccurate results.) Mail-in voting is “a fraud” and “the Democrats want it because it’s the only way they get elected.” By the way, they also want “transgender for everybody.” And “they love crime”.
Zelensky was, at this point, shifting a little uncomfortably in his chair. Utterly unperturbed, Trump continued. His freewheeling narrative alighted, for a second, on immigration: “In 90 days, not one person came in illegally to our country. Even I find that hard to believe!” And some more stuff about how the Democrats had let the southern border get out of control.
A final question, attempting to get the president back onto a topic even remotely related to the Ukrainian leader seated opposite him, ended up with: “I love the Ukrainian people but I love all people. I love Russian people. I love them all.”
The stand-out moment was probably when Zelensky responded to a reporter’s question about why elections are difficult to arrange during active wartime, in terms of logistics. Having taken a while to explain how much extra security is needed, he then added that democratic elections in Ukraine would soon be arranged.
And with a laugh, Trump said, “‘So you’re saying if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections?”
For any other politician, this might mark somewhat of a career low point. But of course today, under the Trump administration, it was just Monday.
And so, somehow, Biden — who isn’t even in the room, who hasn’t been for months — became the central villain of the narrative, eclipsing both Putin and the ongoing missile strikes killing civilians. It’s a remarkable inversion: the man praising the aggressor, lecturing the victim and saving his deepest rage for his domestic rival. If you want to know what obsessions animate Trump’s foreign policy, don’t look to maps of Ukraine; look to the 2020 election.
I’ll admit to believing that it couldn’t get worse than the school bully-style treatment of Zelensky last time he visited Washington, but this was worse. To listen to this press conference, you’d think Biden really was the one rolling tanks into Donetsk. A grievance recital that used the background of war for the foreground of Trump’s hurt feelings is so much less than what the world deserves.
We all saw the red carpet on Friday, the festival-style “ALASKA 2026” and the photo-ops. We all saw the apathy today. Civilians die in Kharkiv, Europe flies in en masse to prop up Ukraine and Trump still finds a way to make the story about his ratings, his stolen thunder, his petty personal rants. If Friday was Broadway-style theater, today was a tragicomedy. And somehow, in the midst of war and mourning, the only thing that got center stage was Trump’s ego.
