It reminded me of a certain kind of unpleasant talk show. The guest shows up, a little nervous but earnest, looking forward to a serious discussion of the issues. But the host lies in wait, spoiling for a fight and ready with ammunition—in this case, complaints about the guest’s supposed lack of gratitude and a poorly planned visit last fall to an arms plant in Pennsylvania, a state thought at the time to be leaning Democratic.
So began last week’s meeting in the Oval Office, Volodymyr Zelensky vs. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. “Much was learned,” Trump posted on Truth Social shortly after the fracas, “that could never be understood without conversation under such fire and pressure. It’s amazing what comes out through emotion.” Sadly, he’s right, but the truth revealed wasn’t about Zelensky. It was about Trump and his unprincipled approach to American foreign policy.
It was 10 excruciating minutes of classic Trump: bullying, lies, and utter indifference to American values.
A good psychologist could have a field day analyzing the dynamic between the three men: just how and when the talk turned ugly and who was responsible. But it should be painfully clear to anyone following the news that Zelensky came to the meeting hat in hand, eager to get along with Trump and win American backing for a fair deal.
The Ukrainian wasn’t seeking peace at any price—no responsible leader would. But he came to the White House despite Trump’s taunts that he was a “dictator” with no popular support. He had swallowed his better judgment and bent to Trump’s will, agreeing to the one-sided minerals deal the White House had insisted on—a deal that would give Trump the unparalleled access he craves while ignoring Zelensky’s plea for reciprocity, most importantly, an American presence to guarantee peace in Ukraine after a ceasefire.
As the full video of the conversation shows, Zelensky laid out a reasoned case backed by painstaking evidence. He brought photographs of Ukrainian POWs before and after their captivity—proof of shocking torture and brutality in Russian prisons. He tried to explain the existential stakes for Ukraine and why the country needs security guarantees. He recited a brief history—distressing though far from complete—of Putin’s past readiness to break promises and violate agreements with other nations. Trump’s scornful reaction: that Zelensky was filled with “hatred”—as if anyone in his shoes could feel any other emotion after three long years of unprovoked aggression that has flattened more than a half dozen Ukrainian cities and killed 45,000 of his countrymen.
Meanwhile, as usual, Trump played fast and loose with the facts. He maintained that Zelensky doesn’t want a ceasefire. He repeated his fanciful, inflated claim that Joe Biden squandered $350 billion to support Kyiv. (According to the authoritative Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the U.S. has contributed $120 billion, while Europe spent $139 billion.)
Trump also painted a grossly oversimplified picture of who is winning the war—Putin has “all the cards,” he insisted, and Zelensky has none. The truth is that Moscow has a narrow edge in the trench warfare on the eastern front, although even there, its advances have been slow and costly—some 1,600 square miles through 2024, an area about the size of Rhode Island, at the cost of 420,000 soldiers killed and wounded. And the picture looks very different at sea, where Ukraine has destroyed or disabled one-third of Russia’s vaunted Black Sea fleet, all but pushing the enemy out of the Black Sea and reopening a channel to export nearly the full volume of grain and vegetable oil Ukraine was selling before the war.
The Ukrainian economy has largely recovered from the shock of the invasion, growing by 18 percent since 2022, when it shrank dramatically. Unemployment and inflation are now down by half. Ukraine still holds nearly 200 square miles of territory in Russia’s Kursk province, and the Ukrainian defense industry, close to nonexistent before the war, supplies some 40 percent of the weaponry deployed on the battlefield. In a fiercely competitive technology race, Ukraine keeps up with and frequently surpasses Russia.
If Russia appears to have all the cards, it’s only because the U.S. is tilting toward Moscow, abandoning a democratic ally in favor of a tyrant and a self-declared opponent of the West. Ukrainians are tired of fighting and eager to see the war end, but they are not desperate or defeated, as Trump seems to believe, and a peace based on that erroneous assumption would be monstrously unfair.
Ultimately, even more shocking than Trump’s bullying style and his casual relationship with the truth is the moral equivalence on display in the Oval Office and, indeed, in his broader approach to the war. “I’m aligned with both of them,” the president insisted just as the meeting began to sour, casting himself as an honest broker between two comparable sides. “I think he’ll keep his word,” he said of Putin the day before in a one-on-one with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Perhaps most astonishing was Trump’s explanation of why he trusts Putin—because of what they “put up with” together in Trump’s first term when Russia was accused of meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump maintained righteously last week—as if the Russian strongman was a combat buddy who had taken a bullet on his behalf.
Most of the world—most Americans, most European leaders, and anyone who has been watching the war—sees no moral equivalence between Ukraine and Russia. They aren’t like two sides in a business deal, each right and entitled to their share. Russia seized the Crimean peninsula—more than 10 percent of Ukrainian territory—out of the blue in 2014. It mobilized proxy fighters—hastily assembled insurgent militias with no justifiable rationale—who took control of another nearly 10 percent of the country in 2014-15. In 2022, Russian troops and tanks poured over the Ukrainian border, again completely unprovoked. Moscow has abducted 20,000 Ukrainian children, and it now lays claim to several Ukrainian cities it has been unable to overrun militarily, expecting the U.S. to hand them over at the negotiating table.
If it were a street brawl, not even a passing stranger would think the two sides were equivalent—it’s clear who the aggressor and the victim are. But that’s only the beginning of Trump’s moral blindness. Even more frightening and dangerous, his might-makes-right understanding of the world makes a mockery of the principles that have guided U.S. foreign policy since World War I.
National sovereignty, inviolability of frontiers, nonintervention in another country’s internal affairs, the right of states to choose their form of government, and international alliances: these sacrosanct tenets—ideas Americans fought and died for in the 20th century—mean nothing to Trump. Nor does he understand that they keep the peace in Europe and Asia, making the world safe for American trade and investment.
“I’m not aligned with anyone,” Trump boasted in the Oval Office, referring to Zelensky and Putin. Alarming as that is, the truth is worse—he’s not aligned with either right or wrong in one of the most clear-cut, consequential moral contests of our time.
