All the effort Kyiv had expended in wooing the White House, combining flattery with bribery and a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, imploded in minutes when Volodymyr Zelenskyy broke the fundamental rule of the new global reality: he told the truth about Donald Trump.
All America’s allies, the great majority of Republican leaders who have bowed to him, and a good number of his own cabinet, know full well that Trump is trapped in a disinformation bubble, but Zelenskyy said it out loud at a press conference on Wednesday.
In this new world where the foreign policy of the most powerful country on Earth has been rapidly reorganised around the fragile ego of a sullen and resentful old man, you might as well launch missiles at America’s eastern seaboard as utter a few words of rebuke.
Trump has a long history of backstabbing and burning bridges with people he wants to “do business with”. If Trump was actually hoping to gain access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth he can forget about it. Zelenskyy has been standing strong against Russia’s aggression for years. Ukraine knows how bad it is to be the puppet state of another state that doesn’t actually care about them. He ain’t going to take any of Trump’s shit.