Five Dispassionate Ways of Looking at Today's Oval Office Blow-Up

This is me trying *very hard* to be astringent.

Photo by Srikanta H. U on Unsplash

Informed readers are no doubt aware that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s White House meeting with President Donald Trump earlier today did not go very well. According to the New York Times’ Peter Baker:

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday in an explosive televised Oval Office shouting match that ultimately blew up plans to sign a rare minerals deal and signaled a dramatic break in relations between two wartime allies.

In a public confrontation unlike any seen between an American president and foreign leader in modern times, Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance castigated Mr. Zelensky for not being grateful enough for U.S. support in its war with Russia and sought to strong-arm him into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictated.

The televised portion of the Oval Office meeting lasted nearly 50 minutes, but the fireworks really got going in the final seven minutes or so. Here’s the relevant video from the BBC:

Everyone and their mother has asked me in the ensuing hours what I thought about this particular blow-up. That has been a difficult question to answer. On a gut level, it was nauseating. Watching the president and vice-president of the United States acting like petulant six-year olds demanding that their poorer friends say “thank you” for being invited to their nice house was both unsurprising and repugnant.

The thing is, when you’re a distinguished professor of international relations you are being asked for more than a gut-level response. So, to be more dispassionate about it, I have one big takeaway and a bunch of smaller observations.

First, my big takeaway is that this meeting revealed that Trump believes he needs to be nice to Vladimir Putin but not to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. At the very outset of the video above, Trump says, “you want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi Vladimir how we doing on the deal?’” It’s not an entirely unreasonable position! After that, however, Trump proceeded to say really terrible things about Zelenskyy to his face no less — while evincing zero concern about whether doing that would upset any deal.

The U.S. president clearly believes that the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must — and Russia is strong and Ukraine is weak and vulnerable to U.S. leverage. One can fairly challenge both Trump’s worldview and his read on the global distribution of power — but this is clearly what he believes.

My smaller takeaways:

Second, I’m legitimately intrigued how Europeans will react to this blow-up. If you watch the entire 50 minutes that was televised, Trump says pretty emphatically that he does not want to blow up NATO and will protect the Poles in particular. I am not saying that Europeans should be in any way mollified by these assertions, but one could argue that if the presser had been stopped one question earlier, they might have been feeling copacetic about the entire exchange.

Third, we are already seeing the effects of the White House selecting the pool reporters. As CNN reported, “A member of Russia’s state-owned news agency gained access to the Oval Office on Friday to cover President Trump’s sit-down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – even as the AP and Reuters were barred from the high-level meeting.” The White House later said that was a mistake but one can only imagine the security implications of such a gaffe.

That TASS reporter might have asked better questions than who the White House let stay. The U.S. reporters did not distinguish themselves. An OANN reporter asked Trump about the “courage” required to open up a dialogue with Putin. It was such a fatuous, ass-kissing question that even Trump took note of it. Then there was Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend:

Fourth, watch the video above and pay close attention to JD Vance and Marco Rubio, because their body language was telling. Vance delighted in the podcaster-style question, thinking it was all in good fun. Rubio, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to be sent to Mars at that exact moment. Rubio later tweeted out his support for the president but make no mistake, he knew exactly how bad the meeting went.

One can judge for themselves which approach was more objectionable, but Elizabeth Picciuto speaks for me:

Fifth, and finally, this will end badly for everyone but Russia. For Ukraine, Trump’s Oval Office blow-up cost them significant support within the GOP. For the United States, Trump and Vance’s behavior once again reduces America’s standing in the rest of the world. For Europe, this will be another nail in the transatlantic coffin. And for Russia, well, it is Christmas and Easter rolled into one.

In conclusion, as per usual during Trump 2.0, things got worse today.