An Appalling Day
Trump and Vance have lowered America to unfathomable depths today
This is one of the most appalling, embarrassing, and childish things I’ve ever seen someone do:
This is beneath - far beneath - the dignity of the offices these two men hold. Not only that, this is behavior that would be condemned among normal, rational human beings, if we treated one another this way in our daily lives or at work. The fact that this is our president and vice president doing this to an ally, to the president of a nation who has been invaded, bombed, and violated by a violent and lawless dictator, just makes it all the worse. I’m ashamed of my country today, in a way I don’t remember ever feeling quite so explicitly before. This is embarrassing. You don’t have to be a proponent of continuing the war in Ukraine to feel that way about this childish behavior from our pathetic president.
And here’s the thing: Trump is going on and on about “making a deal”, which means he wants Zelensky and Ukraine to capitulate completely, and make massive concessions to Putin, while getting nothing in return. But, Ukraine already has a deal in place, one we’ve always honored and should keep honoring: our 1994 treaty with them, in which they agreed to peacefully give up the 1,900 Soviet nuclear weapons in their possession after the end of the Cold War, in return for our promise to guarantee and protect their national sovereignty. They have a deal, one they are counting on us to continue to honor, and we are reneging. It’s shameful, and it diminishes us as a nation.
Again, none of this requires a full-throated support of the war as it is being conducted. We can exert influence on the direction of the war, and work constructively with Ukraine towards an end of some sort. But, they are the invaded nation. They are the one with tens of thousands of dead citizens. They are the ones with hundreds of children kidnapped and disappeared into Russia. Imagine if we were invaded by a neighbor; would America accept a false peace and give away large swathes of our country, for nothing in return? Of course not! It’s insane to think they would!
The worst part of this, for me, is the faux-bully role of J.D. Vance, and his sickening insistence that Zelensky grovel in the Oval Office, and offer up praise and thanks to Donald Trump, as if Trump hasn’t spent the entirety of political career sucking up to Putin, and the entirety of this presidential term making excuses for him and, in essence, making American foreign policy subservient to Russian geopolitical aims. Volodymyr Zelensky proved his worth as a person today, because had such a pathetic man as Vance looked at me, and asked, “have you even said thank you?”, I would have found it nearly impossible to not erupt. It’s the behavior of someone who is a bully, of someone who is a coward, and who covers up that cowardice through false bravado. And yet, everyone knows his cowardice, because we’ve all seen him shrink from a legitimate and thoughtful conservative intellectual, into a groveling and emasculated shell of a politician who is so afraid of getting on the bad side of Donald Trump that there is no level of shamelessness to which he wouldn’t lower himself.
There have been a lot of really bad and sickening and infuriating moments over the last decade that have been a result of Donald Trump. But, this one hits different, not because it is necessarily worse in a policy or human rights sense (although the attempt to extort an invaded ally is pretty bad), but because of the interpersonal dynamics at work here. There’s signing an impersonal Executive Order, and then there’s berating and embarrassing an ally in the Oval Office, in a staged and planned ambush, for political gain and to appease a dictator. Zelensky is a level of leader Trump or Vance will never come close to, a person who has proven his worth and his leadership and his bravery over the last four years. Trump and Vance would be quivering messes if they had to provide leadership in the context Zelensky has.
It really sucks to realize this, but I think this confirms the United States entry on the world scene as one of the Bad Guys, on par with Russia and Iran and China and other authoritarian states, as part of the Axis of Evil that George W. Bush introduced to the national consciousness two decades ago. As a leftist, I’ve always had mixed feelings about our international impact, especially when it comes to the primacy of markets and capitalism and economics above all else that we’ve always pushed. But, I always have had to balance that against the undeniable good we’ve done, through humanitarian aid and democratic influence and our promotion of human rights. But Trump - through actions like this, and his administration’s affinity for fascist-adjacent parties like the AfD in Germany, and his clear love of dictators like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, and the withdrawal of our humanitarian soft power through the destruction of USAID and other programs - has made it clear: the world cannot trust us any longer. Today marks a monumentally sad day in American history. I hope we can salvage one day after this sad little man is long gone, but I don’t know that we will.