The Simple Explanation for Why Trump Turned Against Ukraine

By Jonathan Chait

Wednesday, March 05, 2025

 

Donald Trump’s highly public schism with Volodymyr Zelensky has yielded the kind of doublethink that is common in personality cults. Those believers who approve of the policy hail the great leader’s strategic genius. And those who oppose it cast the blame elsewhere, constructing ever more elaborate accounts of Trump’s strategy to avoid acknowledging the obvious: Trump has an affinity for Vladimir Putin.

 

In the first category, you can find members of the so-called national-conservative movement, who have long rationalized Russia’s aggression and opposed American support for Ukraine. “Trump understands what establishment figures do not: that U.S. voters are no longer willing to allow Washington to write checks on the American people’s account,” the national-conservative intellectual Rod Dreher wrote exultantly after Zelensky’s Oval Office browbeating. Christopher Caldwell, another natcon writer, argued in The Free Press that Trump’s posture toward Ukraine “is a deeper and more historically grounded view than the one that prevailed in the Biden administration,” rejecting Joe Biden’s view of the war as a “barbaric” invasion. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump’s admirers include the Russian government itself, which has congratulated him for “rapidly changing foreign policy configurations,” which “largely coincides with our vision.”)

 

In the second category, you have Trump defenders who support Ukraine, and reacted to Friday’s events with dismay. To resolve their cognitive dissonance, or perhaps to retain their influence, they do not blame Trump for initiating the breach with Zelensky. Instead, they blame Zelensky.

 

The Ukrainian president’s responsibility for the crisis includes such actions as failing to dress properly. “I mean, all Zelensky had to do today was put on a tie, show up, smile, say ‘Thank you,’ sign the papers, and have lunch,” complained Scott Jennings, who had reportedly been considered for White House spokesperson and performs essentially the same function for CNN. “That’s it. And he couldn’t do that.”

 

Ah yes, the tie. Apparently Trump and his supporters care deeply about the tie. If we take this line of argument seriously, it posits that the United States reversed its foreign policy based on an outfit choice—and this argument is being made as a defense of Trump’s judgment.

 

A related and only slightly less damning defense is that Zelensky erred by arguing with Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance when they presented him with a series of pro-Russian positions during their photo op. Trump insisted, falsely, that security guarantees for Ukraine were unnecessary because Putin would never violate one. (He praised Putin’s character and spoke wistfully of how the two men had to endure the “Russia hoax” together.) “Why on earth did Zelensky choose to fact-check Trump in front of the entire world rather than debate the wisdom of a ceasefire behind closed doors?” demands conservative columnist Marc Thiessen, a foreign-policy hawk who has sought to steer Trump toward his own view.

 

This viewpoint has influenced some mainstream media coverage of the fateful White House meeting. A recent Politico story filled with inside-Trump-world reporting, for example, suggests that Trump was eager to cut a deal, if only Zelensky had flattered him sufficiently: The Ukrainian president “infuriated Trump last week with his public suggestion he was swallowing Putin’s disinformation—a response to Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine started the war.” Or perhaps the source of Trump’s split with Ukraine is revealed by him regurgitating Russian propaganda blaming Ukraine for the war, rather than Zelensky correcting him.

 

Trump may be vain and childish, but he does have some substantive beliefs. Lindsey Graham, another Trump-worshipping Republican hawk, told The New York Times that he had warned Zelensky before the meeting, “Don’t take the bait,” and publicly criticized the Ukrainian president for not following his advice. But how did Graham know there would be bait? Perhaps because Trump has spent years expressing sympathy for Russia and contempt for its enemies, including Ukraine and the Western alliance.

 

Trump’s Russophilia used to stand almost unique within the Republican Party. But he has brought large segments of the right around to his position, and many of them have turned Zelensky into a hate figure. The enthusiastically anti-Ukraine conservatives are happy to credit Trump for reversing the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv. Say what you want about the tenets of national conservatism; at least it’s an ethos. The more traditionally anti-Russian conservatives, by contrast, need to find a way to disagree with the outcome of the Oval Office meeting without seeming to criticize Trump. That is how authoritarian political cultures operate: The only permissible way to express disapproval of the leader’s choices is to pretend they were someone else’s.

 

This leads to absurd logical contortions. Anti-Russia conservatives treat their putative objections to Zelenky’s conduct as legitimate standards that he could have met, as if this is a game with fixed rules. Presented with the obvious objection —that Elon Musk had dressed even more slovenly in the Oval Office and a Cabinet meeting just a few days before—the National Review editor in chief, Rich Lowry, retorted, “When Zelensky is named the head of DOGE, he can do the same and get away with it.” Yet no principle of decorum says that a head of state can’t wear a military uniform in the White House but “the head of DOGE” can wear a T-shirt and baseball cap. Everything about this solemn rule is made up, including the position “head of DOGE.” If you have ever watched a school bully, you may recall that accusing their victim of violating some rule or standard, and then flouting the standard themselves, is part of the abuse, a way of signaling that they hold all the power.

 

Trump’s base was poised to explode at Zelensky—for his shirt, for his alleged lack of gratitude—because Trump has signaled that he is their enemy. In their desperation, anti-Russian conservatives have reversed the obvious causation.

 

During Trump’s first term, the theory that he loved Putin was complicated by his inability to overcome resistance by bureaucrats and his own hawkish advisers. This created room for analysts to accept explanations for Trump’s stance other than simple affinity for Putin. Now, however, he is able to quickly carry out such steps as cutting off weapons to Ukraine without sneaking around or being slow-walked by mid-level staff. Meanwhile, he publicly blames Ukraine for the ongoing war and accuses Zelensky of being a dictator who spreads hatred against Russia. The theory that Trump trusts and wants to help Putin can parsimoniously explain his rhetoric and actions.

 

It is the alternative theory, that Trump is playing a clever geopolitical game, that relies on whispered conversations and intricate double-meaning interpretations of his public positions. A Wall Street Journal reporter deduces from “nearly a year of Trumpworld chatter and (sometimes secret) talks with foreign officials” that Trump’s real strategy is to “split Russia from China” and that “there is no way the US will sell Ukraine down the river.” In some foreign-policy circles, analyses discerning a far-reaching plan from wisps of buried evidence are considered sophisticated, while positing that Trump simply believes the things he says almost daily on camera is considered slightly nutty.

 

Whatever you want to say about the anti-Ukraine right’s moral posture, it is at least able to grasp the reality of Trump’s position: He wants to leave Ukraine at Putin’s mercy. The anti-Russia Trumpers, with their missing-tie theory of Trump’s Russia strategy, and their convoluted efforts to explain away his plain wishes, are the ones who have drifted into the realm of fantasy.