“Never forget,” wrote Steve Beschloss, “February 28, 2025, a tragic day when an American president and his vice-president berated and betrayed a democratic ally in the midst of a barbaric war with Russia. Donald Trump’s abusive, demeaning behavior in our Oval Office— in the company of a genuine hero and defender of democracy like Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky— may be the most disgraceful public behavior by any president in our history. It’s hard to see how this grotesque stain will ever wash away… On a strictly human level, it was sickening to witness the abusive, belittling behavior of Trump and his sidekick Vance. What kind of people— what level of indecency and cruelty does it take— to invite a man in the midst of a war to come to the White House, attack him in front of the cameras and whine that he’s not showing sufficient gratitude? As if these ugly sadists believe he should be kneeling down before them. On a political and diplomatic level, this televised display alters 80 years of post-WWII diplomacy and alliances. (The media there included a reporter from Russia’s state-owned TASS, but not banned journalists from the Associated Press and Reuters.) And for what? To ally with the murderous thug Vladimir Putin and thereby accelerate his imperialist ambitions that surely extend beyond Ukraine? To turn America, once a democratic beacon to the world, into a pariah state, an outcast among democratic nations and decent people everywhere? What democratic leader will subjugate himself or herself and tolerate being the next target of this despicable man? In this one appalling exchange— intended to force Ukraine’s leader into accepting an impossible ceasefire without any Russian compromises or security guarantees and to lay the predicate for ending American support— Donald Trump abdicated America’s and an American president’s assumed status as leader of the free world.”
I watched that and saw it the same way Beschloss did. I’ll assume most DWT readers did as well, right? But half the country didn’t. Way back machine: Trump in 2016 “We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” It was classic Trump— off-the-cuff, unpolished, and leaning into his populist appeal. And he has every reason to still love them.
How could Beschloss—and and the rest of us—see the events of Friday, as a “tragic day” of betrayal and disgrace, while virtually every Republican in Congress and among the public interpreted the same Oval Office clash between Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy as a justified or even commendable stance, a starkly different perceptions?
We see what happened as a shocking breach of decency and a rupture of America’s historical role as a defender of democracy— an unprovoked attack on a wartime leader fighting for his nation’s survival. The imagery of Trump and Vance berating Zelensky, demanding gratitude, and threatening to abandon Ukraine evokes a sense of righteous moral outrage. We understand our country has a responsibility to support democratic allies, especially against authoritarian aggression like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We understand that publicly humiliating a foreign leader, particularly in the Oval Office, violates decades of diplomatic protocol and weakens the nation’s global standing. We understand that Trump’s behavior was another ugly example of his deliberate alignment with Putin, undermining Ukraine to appease an autocrat for personal and political gain.
I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to point out that this perspective resonates with those who understand and value America’s post-World War II legacy as a leader of the free world, a role built on alliances like NATO and a commitment to countering threats like Russian expansionism. We understand that Trump’s and Vance’s actions signal a reckless abandonment of that legacy, emboldening Putin and other aggressor and authoritarians and isolating the U.S. from its democratic partners.
In contrast, the poorly educated (and those playing to that mob)— both in Congress and among the public— saw the same event as a bold assertion of American interests and a necessary rebuke of Zelenskyy, just the way Trump and Vance painted it. MAGA Mike, for example, praised Trump for ending the days of America being “disrespected.” Trump and Vance’s approach aligns with a core tenet of modern Republicanism: prioritizing U.S. interests over foreign entanglements. For many GOP supporters, Ukraine’s war is a distant conflict that shouldn’t drain American resources or risk escalation. Trump’s ultimatum— “make a deal or we’re out”— resonates as a pragmatic, no-nonsense stance, not a betrayal. Republicans like Lindsey Graham and Vance expressed irritation with Zelensky’s perceived ingratitude and intransigence. Vance accused him of being “disrespectful” by challenging U.S. policy in the Oval Office, while Trump emphasized that Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” without American support. This suggests a belief that Zelensky overplayed his hand, expecting unconditional U.S. backing without acknowledging America’s leverage or sacrifices.
Public opinion among Republicans has shifted against prolonged foreign aid, especially after decades of involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Polls show growing GOP fatigue with Ukraine aid, with many viewing it as a blank check. Trump and Vance’s confrontation tapped into this sentiment, lying blatantly about the amount of aid given and framing Zelenskyy as demanding more than the U.S. should give.
Normal people see Trump’s brash, confrontational demeanor as vile and repulsive; Republicans see it as a feature, not a bug. Republicans in Congress and the public often cheer his willingness to “stand up” to foreign leaders, seeing it as strength rather than indecency. They see the clash not as disgraceful but as Señor T keeping a campaign promise to put America first.
Like Beschloss we tend to see the world from a globalist lens, where America’s strength lies in its alliances and moral leadership. Trump’s actions threaten that order. Republicans, especially the dominant MAGA wing, embrace a nationalist lens, where America’s strength is about self-reliance and leverage, not babysitting weaker nations. They see Zelenskyy as a supplicant who overstepped. For us, demanding gratitude from a war-torn ally is cruel and petty and we see Zelenskyy’s resistance to Trump’s and Putin’s pressure as heroic. For Republicans, Zelenskyy’s pushback was insolent, given the billions in U.S. aid provided.
We understand that Trump’s stance was a gift to Putin, aligning the country with an autocrat over a democrat. Most Republicans don’t understand this— remember, “the poorly educated”— and tend to dismiss this as partisan hyperbole. They argue Trump’s focus is on ending the war, not favoring Russia. GOP lawmakers like Graham and MAGA Mike, despite past Ukraine support, pivoted to criticize Zelenskyy, reflecting pressure from a base that’s souring on aid. This suggests political calculus aligning with Trump’s agenda— overrode prior hawkish stances.
Among the public, this divide mirrors broader polarization. Republicans who support Trump— roughly 80% of the party— cheered his tough talk, seeing it as standing up to a foreign leader who’s taken U.S. support for granted. Ultimately, the disconnect boils down to what each side values and fears. Republicans are, by nature, selfish and bullying. They fear being suckered into another forever war or disrespected by allies even while we value alliances, democratic solidarity, and America’s moral credibility. Our fear is that Trump’s approach heralds isolationism and emboldens tyrants. What’s happening in the country now is a collision of worldviews, amplified by Trump’s polarizing style and the high stakes of Ukraine’s war. Republicans didn’t see the grotesque stain we do; they saw a reset of priorities. Whether that reset holds— or crumbles under Putin’s next move— remains the real question. How much of this divide is a matter of defective reasoning, sheer igniorance and moral failing?
On the surface, there’s no glaring logical breakdown in the Republican position. Their view— that Trump and Vance were right to confront Zelensky— rests on a coherent framework. The “America First” stance has been a GOP rallying cry since 2016. Rejecting Beschloss’s framing aligns with that ideology— dismissing global leadership as a burden rather than a virtue. We can disagree, but it’s not illogical within their worldview.
We see Trump’s behavior as “sickening” and “cruel,” an example of a severe character defect in those who excuse it. Republicans lack empathy for Zelensky’s plight, seeing him as a foreign leader gaming U.S. generosity rather than a hero. Vance’s quip about Zelensky’s “disrespect” and Trump’s demand for gratitude suggest they view him transactionally, not as a moral cause. If you think empathy for a war-torn ally is non-negotiable, that’s a flaw— serious to some, situational to others. Many Republicans likely see Trump’s rudeness as a tool, not a sin. If humiliating Zelensky forces a deal that stops the war (and U.S. spending), they’d call it a win. Beschloss sees a stain; they see a means to an end. Whether that trade-off is “indecent” depends on your ethical lens— deontological duty to allies or consequentialist focus on outcomes. Many of these Republicans are naive or even complicit about Russia. If Trump’s push for a ceasefire hands Putin a victory— letting him keep occupied Ukrainian land with no guarantees— he could regroup and threaten NATO next. Republicans dismiss this as fearmongering and many want to severe ties with NATO anyway. If you prioritize human suffering and alliance loyalty the GOP stance certainly looks cold and reckless.
Loyalty to Trump seems to blind his supporters to Beschloss’ points. His base sees him as infallible, reflexively backing him over evidence, a flaw serious in its rigidity). Trump’s bombast is old news to his supporters. What Beschloss calls “disgraceful” they call Monday. If they’re numb to his style, they’re not flawed so much as conditioned.
Yesterday, Russian-born transgender journalist and author Masha Gessen— who Russian has an arrest warrant for— wrote that Putin and Trump “have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home... Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945. Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last, Trump is handing him the knife.”
This week, Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine… On Twitter, where Dugin has been hyperactive in the last weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up to elections last week in Germany, he posted, ‘Vote AfD or we will occupy Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.’…
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine understands the enormity of the threat, not only to his country but to Europe, for which Ukraine has served as a deadly buffer zone. But on Friday, when he tried to talk about this threat during an Oval Office meeting, Trump and Vice President JD Vance became furious. They yelled at him, demanding that he acknowledge his powerlessness and grovel in gratitude. The talks collapsed.
What happens to Ukraine now? Before Zelensky’s visit to Washington, the best-case scenario was for Russia to agree to a cease-fire in exchange for the roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory that it currently occupies. That would leave millions of Ukrainian citizens— those who live in the occupied territories and those who have been displaced east— under the rule of Russian totalitarianism. Now that outcome, which was never likely to begin with, appears all but impossible. We are now in the realm of the worst-case scenario, in which it is possible to imagine Putin launching a renewed offensive against Ukraine, aimed at total domination, this time with the active assistance of the United States.
Putin doesn’t just want a return to the 20th century. He already resides there, and that is where anyone looking for what could happen next should turn. Specifically to 1938, when the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who fancied himself a brilliant negotiator and an expert in all things, brokered an agreement that gave Hitler Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia. In exchange, the rest of Europe would, ostensibly, be safe from German aggression. A year after the resulting Munich Agreement was signed, of course, Germany invaded Poland and World War II officially began.
When Trump, fuming, threatened Zelensky with the potential for World War III, he may have been drawing a more accurate historical parallel than he realized.
What happens if Russia unleashes its aggression against Europe, unchecked or even aided by the United States? The exact contours of the looming catastrophe are impossible to predict. It will not look like the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century. But just as certainly, it will not look like the world in which we have been living and in which the populations of most of the world’s wealthy countries have felt safe.
I am reminded of reading about the lives of exiles in Paris in the 1930s. German Jews and Communists, who had run for their lives, watched as the world reshuffled itself. Political parties that used to be antifascist flipped overnight, assuming positions that ranged from appeasement to a full embrace. French and British leaders looked away as Hitler tested his strength outside Germany. As antifascism was marginalized, antisemitism became mainstream. Hitler’s victims were blamed for their own misfortune.
Most days now, I touch base with Russian or Belarusian friends in exile who are experiencing a terrifying sort of déjà vu. We are perhaps more shocked than our American friends are by the speed with which the very rich and powerful, like the Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, have become enablers of Trumpism, and how the air itself seems to change, until suddenly it’s Zelensky, with his clear-eyed vision and firm principles, who seems like an anomaly.
We’ve seen it all before, and that is one of the reasons we are shocked: We’ve seen how it ends. Another is that we didn’t expect to see this happen in the United States. We thought that our countries were particularly vulnerable to political warping because of their decades-long histories of totalitarianism. “It was nice to know that there was one country where the people in charge were, if not likable, then at least sane,” is how the young Russian exile Ksenia Mironova put it. More than that, it was nice to think that the society was sane.
A 26-year-old journalist who was forced to flee Russia in the middle of the night three years ago, whose fiancé is in a prison colony serving a 22-year sentence for high treason, who passed through six countries before finding shelter in New York in a film program, Mironova used to think it was just her bad luck to be born in Russia. Now, increasingly, it looks like this world was an unlucky place to be born into. At the start of her spring semester, Mironova received an email informing her that her funding had been cut off as a result of one of Trump’s executive orders. Where should she go? Returning to Russia is not an option. If Trump sides with Putin the United States won’t be, either.
“And even Mars is going to be colonized by Musk,” Mironova said.
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