Blame Trump for the Oval Office Fiasco with Zelensky

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Monday, March 03, 2025

 

The times change. The bipartisan delusion never does. Hence, I’ve had limitless opportunities lo these two-plus decades to proclaim myself a proudly unreconstructed Cold War American (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Complicating something that’s actually very simple leads to such debacles as last Friday afternoon. And no, I’m not talking about what our editorial aptly calls “The Ugly Oval Office Spat,” or at least not mainly about that. I’m talking about the bickering over who is at fault.

 

The president of the United States is at fault.

 

Yes, Ukraine’s president performed incompetently. But with due respect to many of my friends and colleagues, to pretend that the real problem here is Volodymyr Zelensky’s heedlessness rather than President Trump’s nature and moral cluelessness — his mulish determination to be a neutral arbiter between a monstrous anti-American predator and its beleaguered, pro-Western prey — is as crazy as Trump’s apparent conviction that Vladimir Putin is an ally waiting to happen (or, as the Bush-43 administration put it while similarly smitten, a “strategic partner”).

 

Perhaps Democrats — with their own long history of Putin dalliances again interrupted by a Trump administration — will now understand why people with common sense are appalled when they look at Russia’s ally, Iran, as if it would surely change its behavior — against its core convictions, against its near half century as the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American jihadist terrorism — if only we showed it enough respect, if only we admitted that our hubris is responsible for its barbarity.

 

President Trump’s Putin infatuation? Yeah, it’s nauseating. In fact, I find it substantially indistinguishable from the way President Obama swooned when talking about Islamists.

 

I’m prepared to stipulate that Zelensky was unwise to argue publicly with the president and that it was especially foolish — given that his English is okay but not fluent or nuanced — to have the argument in English. That doesn’t change two remorseless facts: The things Zelensky was saying about Russia’s unprovoked invasion were true, and the things Trump was saying about “peace” and Putin’s supposed desire for it were bizarre.

 

I say that as someone who has been less gung-ho on American support for Ukraine than some of my colleagues. To be clear, I’ve always favored military support for Kyiv — and removing restrictions on the Ukrainians’ use of it — for as long as they are willing to fight and bleed Putin’s army. I don’t sit up at night worrying about making Russia America’s enemy — that’s already the state of play. And I’m not paralyzed by fears about Russian escalation. But I don’t think our support is bottomless. How much is it worth for us, at $36 trillion in debt, to pay for the serious degrading of Putin’s armed forces with no American boots on the ground? That has to be constantly evaluated. It seems like a bargain to me at the right price, but it obviously has to be the right price — balanced against our other defense and spending priorities, just as Presidents Carter and Reagan supported and armed the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets for a decade, consistent with our interests but modulated so it didn’t undermine other essentials.

 

I’m also resigned that a cease-fire is unlikely to restore Ukraine to its pre-2022 borders (let alone its pre-2014 borders). I don’t see, however, why the United States should front, as though it were an endorsement, an outcome we may reluctantly have to abide. I wouldn’t take any formal action signaling that our government recognized the legitimacy of Russia’s annexation. “Peace” is not merely the absence of shooting, and any cease-fire is likely to be used by Putin, just like it’s used by Hamas, as a strategic pause. Ergo, if the Ukrainians wanted to make Putin pay with a long, bloody insurgency, more power to them.

 

With all that said, I don’t understand the logic of blaming Zelensky for Friday’s debacle. The fact that Trump is “transactional,” thinks the consummation of a deal is more significant than its substance, can’t get over himself, has a thing for despots, and craves flattery is not something we are required to consider “the facts on the ground” that Zelensky and everybody else have to grow up and deal with. Yeah, Zelensky should have been well-prepared; he should have dressed like this was serious diplomatic business, and he should have performed more adeptly. But his shortcomings in these regards are not the problem.

 

Nor is Vice President JD Vance to blame. True, it’s impossible to watch the 50 minutes of cringe without noticing the rehearsed manner of Vance’s demagogic provocations — as the White House, not Zelensky, let the televised spectacle go on for at least a half-hour too long. Vance was insidious, spouting lies (Zelensky hasn’t said “thank you” . . . except, you know, for the eight zillion times he’s said thank you — and that was only on Friday) in an effort to bluster past (a) the administration’s lack of a coherent answer to the question of why any sentient person would trust Putin to honor a cease-fire, and (b) the administration’s previous slew of lies — e.g., Trump had a plan to end the war in 24 hours; Russia has “lost” 1.5 million soldiers (the number killed is probably smaller than 200,000, with around half a million wounded); we’ve given Ukraine $350 billion (an exaggeration by a factor of at least two and more likely three); Zelensky is a “dictator”; Ukraine “started” the war (apparently by living next door to an unreconstructed KGB monster who can’t help himself but invade and annex); blah, blah, blah.

 

It’s all shameful. Even if you want out of Ukraine entirely, what’s the case for the United States of America getting to that outcome by serial falsehoods? Still, there was only one person in the Oval Office who is in charge of directing U.S. foreign policy, and it’s not Vance. It is President Trump.

 

And there is only one fact that matters, in the sense that everything needs to flow from it: Putin’s Russian regime is an incorrigible enemy of the United States. It’s a fading, backward country: Its size, dynastic legacy, and prodigious nuclear arsenal cannot hide its third-rate economy, declining population and life expectancy, and high levels of dysfunction (alcoholism, unemployment, disease, etc.); its armed forces, though not nearly as shattered as Trump claims, have been exposed as vastly overrated in the Ukraine war. Yet, while Putin’s mafia state is no Soviet hegemon, it is equally anti-American in spirit. It may now be China’s junior partner rather than its patron, but it remains comfortably ensconced in a global anti-American axis.

 

That’s the main thing we need to know about Russia. The rest is details — important details, sure, but no single detail or the lot of them is as important as getting the fundamental, immutable fact right: Putin is the enemy. President Trump has it a hundred percent wrong. Behind all the realist bravado is the same old grandiose delusion: He’s going to be the one to turn the bear into a poodle with charm and money and respect and deals. Same old lunacy, and it will get us the same old failure.

 

Ukraine will be the proximate casualty but, in the scheme of things, America will reap the most consequential damage because we’re the far more consequential country. We have interests that dwarf Ukraine’s, and Putin’s Russia seeks to undermine us at every turn. A child who wasn’t blinded by self-regard could see Putin’s game a mile away: He yields nothing of importance to himself but throws Trump the occasional bone — a hostage here, a cost-free compliment there — designed to stoke our nation’s internal political divide. And it works because Democrats and anti-Trumpers are more than willing to play their part — Putin has them pegged, too. Nevertheless, in foreign affairs, it’s the president who most matters.

 

And why does Trump think what he thinks? To my mind, among the least discussed but most telling moments Friday were the two times that Trump said he and Putin have a bond because they went through “Russia, Russia, Russia” together.

 

To be sure, no one can rationally begrudge the president his white-hot hostility against the Democrats who tried to destroy his first administration with baseless claims that he was a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. But in his self-absorption, he can’t or won’t discern that not everyone tied to him by the Russiagate smear is his friend — much less America’s friend. Russiagate is not something Putin suffered through; it is something he delighted in. He reveled in it to a fare-thee-well and egged Trump on in the risible notion that they were being jointly, unjustly maligned. That’s not because Putin likes Trump. It’s because he hates America.

 

Putin is a sophisticated, KGB-trained operator. He grasped that Democrats, with their history of appeasing the Soviet Union and Putin himself, do not care about his regime’s savagery any more than they care about the savagery of Iran, Cuba, Hamas, or fill-in-the-blank anti-American radicals. The Clinton campaign made Putin the star of its Russiagate fabrication in order to torment Trump, nothing more. And Putin was glad for the star turn because it was a rich opportunity to inflame America’s deep political divisions — infighting that makes America weaker and thus less equipped to pursue vital U.S. interests and to counter Russia and its allies (China, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, among others).

 

You always have to hope that Trump is more rational behind the scenes than he appears to be publicly. I say “hope” because I have my doubts. I’m not convinced he’s that canny; I think the Trump you see is the Trump you get. For all I know, he really is commiserating with Putin over how the Democrats slandered “them.” If so, what I mainly wonder is how Putin gets through such conversations with a straight face.

 

In any event, when the president of the United States doesn’t recognize America’s enemies, when he hallucinates them into America’s friends because he thinks he personally has an amicable, potentially fruitful relationship with the odious tyrants who run them, then America is courting disaster.