Alan Zendell, February 28, 2025

Just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, the arrogant, insulting behavior of President Trump and Vice President Vance in their White House ambush of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky illustrated how quickly hope can turn to terrified despair. That’s surely what 40 million Ukrainians must be feeling, not to mention the leaders of our former allies in western Europe. You can watch and listen to it here.

The appalling dressing down of the president of a sovereign nation that has been brutally attacked for three years by Russia, captured live before the entire world is unprecedented. The clowns our country elected to govern us last November have no class and even less sense of history. Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Charles deGaulle addressing the president of Poland, Ignacy Mościcki that way as Hitler’s military was bombing his country? To most of Europe, Vladimir Putin’s determination to recreate the Soviet Union looks very much like a replay of the lead-up to World War II.

Zelensky tried to make that point today, on camera, as French President Emanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer did earlier this week in separate meetings with Trump. What an embarrassing, frightening spectacle. The leaders of two nuclear powers whose soldiers have shed blood alongside our own in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and who stood with us in complete solidarity after 9-11, had to bow their heads and bend their knees to a narcissistic wannabe emperor. It’s what might happen if a spiteful child somehow got control of our ICBM launch codes, and the rest of the world had to tiptoe on eggshells to pacify him.

Much of the MAGA crowd will cheer their heroes for today’s performance. The remaining real Republicans in Congress, and all the rest of us, however, will look on in horror. Our mentally ill president is simply acting out a personal grudge against Zelensky.  It was Zelensky who refused to let Trump blackmail him into framing Hunter Biden, and whose resistance baited Trump into attempting a public shakedown of the Ukrainian president, which resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. Trump’s fury and embarrassment over his own illegal action is what caused the resentment he showed today, because Trump cannot ever be seen to be wrong or weak.

I wonder if Trump ever read Gulliver’s Travels in school. If he did, the message didn’t sink in. Remember the story of Gulliver and the Lilliputians? Of the many moral lessons offered by Jonathan Swift, the one that made the most impression on me was that even if you’re a giant in a land of tiny people, if they unite against you, your size advantage won’t help you. Trump imagines himself a giant among world leaders. He thinks he can dictate not only to Americans but to the rest of the world. We knew his ego had no bounds, but even I never imagined a scene like the one in the video link.

Zelensky and the leaders of almost every NATO country view the war in Ukraine as an existential threat to the whole world. When they compare it to Hitler’s attempt to take over Europe, and the war that cost 40 million lives, their message is clear. Giving in to Putin and rewarding his aggression is the surest way to wind up fighting another major war in Europe. We’ve been taught all our lives to never give in to terrorists and bullies, because that simply tells them we’re afraid to defend ourselves.

Vice President Vance has never been a supporter of defending Ukraine against Russia. He wasn’t always a blind isolationist, but his conversion from a never-Trumper to an acolyte was on display before the world today. Did Trump and Vance orchestrate today’s spectacle, with Trump sitting back and pretending to hear Zelensky while Vance waited for the right moment to attack him verbally on camera? If that’s not what happened, Vance went rogue, and Trump couldn’t resist humiliating his guest..

The thought of Trump and Vance egging each other on, stroking each other’s need to be relevant is horrifying. Is the fate of the world in the hands of two people drunk on power, neither of whom has a realistic sense of history or our future? The only reason our allies put up with it is that we control most of the West’s nuclear arsenal.

Perhaps today was just a performance to humiliate Zelensky before the world, and once Trump’s ego is satisfied and Zelensky resigns, he’ll make a sensible deal with whomever succeeds him. But this clown show is no way to conduct diplomacy, and it puts us all at risk. Trump had the audacity to assert that in defending his country against Russia, Zelensky is leading us into World War III.