Oppression recoils from defiance. Tyranny cannot tolerate resistance. Brutality is infuriated by courage. Darkness cannot abide light. Putin and Trump are aligned in working towards regime change— in Ukraine. Yesterday, Jamie Dettmer reported that 4 senior members of Trumpanzyy’s entourage “have held secret discussions with some of Kyiv’s top political opponents to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, just as Washington aligns with Moscow in seeking to lever the Ukrainian president out of his job. The senior Trump allies held talks with Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, a remorselessly ambitious former prime minister, and senior members of the party of Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s immediate predecessor as president. The discussions centered on whether Ukraine could hold quick presidential elections. These are being delayed in line with the country’s constitution because Ukraine remains under martial law. Critics of holding elections say they could be chaotic and play into Russia’s hands, with so many potential voters serving on the front lines or living abroad as refugees.”
Trump may be solving both problems— by cutting of ammunition to the Ukrainian military and by revoking legal status for a quarter million Ukrainian refugees living in the U.S. The move is expected by next month, “a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden's administration.”
Dettmer wrote that “The Trump aides are confident that Zelenskyy would lose any vote due to war fatigue and public frustration over rampant corruption. Indeed, his poll ratings have been in decline for years, although they have picked up in the wake of last week’s Oval Office brawl, when the Ukrainian leader was shown the door after being berated by Trump and Vance. The most recent poll shows Zelenskyy still comfortably ahead in the race for the presidency… Trump has accused Zelenskyy of being a ‘dictator without elections’ and hinted he would not be ‘around very long’ if he didn’t do a deal with Russia. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has falsely accused Kyiv of canceling the election… The key to all of the plans under discussion via back channels is to hold presidential elections after a temporary ceasefire is agreed, but before full-scale peace negotiations get underway in earnest. The idea of an early presidential election is also being pushed by the Kremlin, which has wanted to be rid of Zelenskyy for years... Trump’s decision this week to pause military aid to Ukraine has only added to the political alarm here and has boosted the back-channeling by Ukraine’s politicians with Trump World.”
All of that is prompting Zelenskyy’s domestic political opponents and even some former allies to pay court to Trump World to gain its blessing. “They’re positioning themselves as the best people to work with. And people who would consent to many of the things that Zelensky isn’t consenting to,” the Republican expert said.
Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the foreign affairs committee of the Ukrainian parliament [who nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize and is sorry for doing so now], told Politico’s power play podcast that elections would only be to Moscow’s benefit.
“I believe Trump doesn’t care about whether Ukraine has elections or not. It’s Putin’s narrative, Putin’s goal. Trump is being used by Putin to impose elections on Ukraine with only one purpose, to undermine us from within. He wants to remove Zelenskyy because he is a symbol of our resistance. Putin understands that an election campaign during times of war will be destructive for our unity and for our stability,” he said.
The tremors from the Oval Office bust-up are also triggering talk of parliamentary realignments.
Trump’s ‘government by chaos’ brand is not popular— not in the U.S., not around the world (other than with America’s rivals). CNN reported that six weeks into his chaotic regime, “as Trump makes gut-check calls to dismantle post-Cold War national security arrangements, the global free trade system, and the federal machine— all of which helped make the US a superpower— a new realization is dawning. There doesn’t seem to be a plan. Trump’s haphazard efforts to make peace in Ukraine, revive Rust Belt-heavy industry with 19th century-style tariffs and slash government are as improvisational as the ‘weave’— his name for his stream-of-consciousness campaign screeds. And the world is once again left hanging on the ‘America first’ president’s whims and obsessions. ‘There’s too much unpredictability and chaos coming out of the White House right now,’ Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said Wednesday, describing US trade policy as a ‘psychodrama’ her country can’t go through every 30 days.”
And domestically, “For some MAGA supporters, Trump’s genius for enraging Democrats, the media and foreign governments is an end in itself. And for ideologues on the populist nationalist right, sparking pandemonium in Washington and destroying governing agencies is a way of deconstructing the administrative state. Trump’s method was honed in his office high up in the skyscraper that bears his name in Manhattan. The future president learned through his real estate career how to push opponents off balance with outlandish demands, verbal confrontations and sudden switches of position. In government, he does the same thing to disorientate adversaries and seeks to impose power amid the mayhem. But while unpredictability is a real estate superpower, it’s a liability when running a country, an economy and a planet— where continuity and predictability are preferred.”
In 2006, the principals of the National Geographic-Roper Global Geographic Literacy Survey wrote that “Americans are far from alone in the world, but from the perspective of many young Americans, we might as well be. On this survey, most young adults between the ages of 18 and 24— the most recent graduates of our educational system— demonstrate a limited understanding of the world beyond their country’s borders, and they place insufficient importance on the basic geographic skills that might enhance their knowledge… [B]y and large, majorities of young adults fail at a range of questions testing their basic geographic literacy... Also striking is young Americans’ ignorance of how the United States fits into the wider world… [and] are unprepared for an increasingly global future. Far too many lack even the most basic skills for navigating the international economy or understanding the relationships among people and places that provide critical context for world events.” Where do you think Trump fits into that picture? Really, you think he knows squat about the rest of the world outside of his golf resorts and the hotels bearing his name?
As someone who has spent years living, working and traveling abroad, I’m sensitive to the changing perception about our country and about Americans because of Trump’s malevolent clownishness and bungled leadership. Anne Applebaum got it right yesterday when she pointed out that most of the world now sees Americans as the bad guys. The ugly scene in the Oval Office shattered positive preconceptions about the country. “In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand-new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans— whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery— those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast. Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho ‘win.’ They announced that they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would ‘get’ Greenland, which is a part of Denmark— a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.”
These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.
The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternative reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many cease-fires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.
It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a cease-fire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?
But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance— who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year— told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or Twitter.
Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time, Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.
But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth, it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three-quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.
In reality, the Russians have said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the past decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but that millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.
And in the Oval Office, Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.
I couldn’t have agreed with Michelle Goldberg more when she told the NY Times that “Democrats shouldn’t have shown up at all [for Trump’s congressional lie-fest on Tuesday], but if they were going to be there, noisy protest made more sense than holding up dumb little paddles. There’s nothing dignified about quietly playing the foil to an autocratic thug gloating about stripping America for parts.” She noted that Trump’s worst moment was his “barrage of easily debunked lies about millions of dead people who could be collecting Social Security checks. The best-case scenario is that he was simply demonstrating, once again, his contempt for the truth, but it seemed like propaganda to justify Social Security cuts.”
Let’s call this what it is: a grotesque, backroom betrayal of a nation bleeding for its freedom, orchestrated by a sneering mobster wannabe and his simpering lapdog. Trump and Putin aren’t just aligned— they’re two sides of the same rusted authoritarian coin, gleefully torching Ukraine’s defiance to prop up their own brittle egos. Nor is this diplomacy; it’s a shakedown, a mafia hit dressed up as policy. Trump’s choking off ammo to Ukraine’s fighters, ripping legal status from refugees, and strong-arming Zelenskyy out of power— all while Putin cackles and sharpens his knives. The Oval Office brawl wasn’t a negotiation; it was a public execution of decency, a middle finger to every Ukrainian who’s died resisting tyranny. And the GOP’s sniveling chorus cheers it on, proving they’d rather lick boots than stand for anything. This is the America Trump’s selling: a bully’s paradise where allies are prey, truth is a punchline and chaos is the only currency. Europe’s waking up, the world’s recoiling, and history’s watching— because this isn’t just a policy failure, it’s a moral gutting. If this is “America First,” then it’s a nation sprinting headlong into the abyss, dragging the free world down with it. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to fight back, or kiss liberty au revoir— whether that includes the Democratic Party and its abysmal congressional leadership or not.
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