Trigger warning: Watching the Jerry Springer-like cascade of Trumpian lies while Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky attempted to correct the record of Russia's attacks on his country is almost unbearable. One wonders if the whole televised event was a set-up, as many have charged, because Trump and Vance merely wanted to weaken the Ukrainian president, or simply another chaotic episode in Donald Trump's presidency by greed and misadventure.

Either way, this is not diplomacy as anyone has previously understood it.

After positive meetings in the morning with members of Congress, Zelenskyy appeared on edge with Trump, intent on setting the record straight. And that record is a dire account of war crimes. While most outlets showed only the heated exchanges, in the early part of the press conference, Zelenskyy also told Trump that Russians had kidnapped 20,000 Ukrainian children, separating them from their families, changing their names and educating them to be loyal Russians. He showed Trump photographs of Ukrainian soldiers beaten and starved in Russian prisons.

Unlike British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, who made obligatory visits to kiss the Trump ring this week in hopes of preserving NATO, Zelenskyy struggled to remain impassive (or react deftly as Macron did) when Trump unleashed his usual firehose of lies. Looking exhausted and stressed, the Ukrainian president explained that without security guarantees, a ceasefire would be tantamount to surrender. He underscored that Russia broke agreements repeatedly after 2014, when Russia occupied and annexed Crimea after Ukrainians unseated a Russian puppet president. Zelenskyy's point was that Putin's Russia could not be trusted to adhere to a ceasefire agreement without guarantees that NATO countries would step in if the agreement was violated.

Trump dodged the question, although he did promise more arms. That commitment, unsurprisingly, has now been reeled back.

Voices were raised after J.D. Vance unleashed the patronizing tone he inflicted on Europeans at the Munich Security Conference, asking Zelenskyy why he hadn't thanked Trump and the U.S. for supporting Ukraine. But it's likely that the real sticking point for Zelenskyy was the question of security guarantees.

So many questions. If Zelenskyy had already committed to signing the minerals agreement, why did he seize the opportunity to correct the record on Trump's lies about Ukraine? Was it simply that Zelenskyy wasn't about to kiss ass after Trump has already given away the store to Russia? Mr. Art of the Deal had given Putin assurances that Ukraine wouldn't be invited to join NATO, that Russia could retain territory it now controls, and that the U.S. would not join a peacekeeping force if one is assembled, along with hints that sanctions on Russia would be lifted.

Perhaps there was a tacit recognition that there would be no genuine ceasefire negotiation with Trump so clearly on Putin's side, so what was the point of a preliminary agreement? On the other hand, the minerals agreement was not particularly meaningful, so why not give Trump his faux victory, the way Mexico had done with the “rewrite” of the North American Free Trade Agreement?

This is where the conversation went sideways. It started with Vance:

Vance: I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country. [Zelensky begins to respond] Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems—you should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.

Zelensky: Have you ever been to Ukraine to see what problems we have? Come once.

Vance: I’ve actually watched and seen the stories, and I know what happens is you bring people on a propaganda tour, Mr. President. Do you disagree that you’ve had problems bringing people in your military, and do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?

Trump jumped in a few beats later.

Trump: We’re going to feel very good and very strong. You’re, right now, not in a very good position. You’ve allowed yourself to be in a very bad position. You don’t have the cards right now with us. [Zelensky continues speaking] You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War Three. You’re gambling with World War Three, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have.

Vance: Have you said thank you once?

It devolved from there, and it's worth watching the entire meeting, below, if your stomach is strong. Trump berated Zelenskyy, as one writer put it, in a scene right out of The Sopranos. The Ukrainian president left the White House without the agreement being signed. The public shouting match was unprecedented in the annals of diplomacy.

Channeling Franklin Roosevelt speaking after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, journalist Marc Cooper called it "a day that will live in infamy," writing: "For the the first time in history the U.S. has switched sides in a hot war."

Perhaps it was all a setup, as some have written. But can anyone go wrong underestimating the Trump propensity for chaos? Perhaps Trump thought he could win-win-win: becoming a hero for achieving a ceasefire, making bank, and remaining on good terms with Russia. If so, that was almost certainly a delusion, since Trump had no intention of providing the security guarantees necessary for Ukrainian participation.

Why was Zelenskyy seemingly on a short fuse? Sen. Lindsay Graham told Fox News that he had warned Zelenskyy not to let himself be baited, and to 'be grateful' and 'be thankful' to Trump when they met. Perhaps Zelenskyy was simply burned out, or just being honest, as he told Bret Baier at Fox News later in the day.

So many questions. Why was the event televised? And why was Vance attending the meeting at all?

Ironically, the minerals "deal" as Trump vulgarly referred to it, was fairly innocuous. Negotiators had bargained the Trump administration down from the unrealistic demand for $500 billion in mineral revenues, a figure that appeared to be largely imaginary since it's unclear whether Ukraine possesses that amount of mineral wealth. In fact, Katty Kay reported on The Rest is Politics US that the Obama administration had rejected a similar arrangement because of logistical barriers.

The negotiated agreement was geared to paying for Ukraine's reconstruction after the war, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

It’s instructive to watch Trump dodging the question of security guarantees in the meeting. It seems possible that Trump (and Putin) were imagining Ukraine as a colony funneling wealth to both the U.S. and Russia; needless to say, with substantial rakeoffs to Trump and Putin personally.

As Journal contributor Brin-Jonathan Butler pointed out, one of the great ironies of this meeting was the presence of a bust of Winston Churchill, who came to the White House in 1940 to ask Franklin Roosevelt for help fighting the Germans. This was the beginning of the Atlantic Alliance. Yesterday's meeting may have been the end.

While Democrat Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) pledged to keep working to repair the rift, Republican senators, including the reliably craven Graham and the occasionally coherent Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) quickly fell into line. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a retired Air Force Brigadier General was that rare Republican willing to risk the wrath of The Don, calling it "a bad day for U.S. foreign policy."

"Ukraine wants independence, free markets and rule of law," Bacon said in a Friday text message to The Hill. "It wants to be part of the West. Russia hates us and our Western values. We should be clear that we stand for freedom."

Yale historian Tim Snyder, seen in the video below, described Friday's disastrous meeting as the final sign that the U.S. under Trump is aligned with Russia. There have been many such signals, including Attorney General Pam Bondi's shutdown of the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force on her first day in office.

The larger question is this: Why does the Trump administration seem intent on destroying America?

As Snyder points out, there is no advantage to undermining our alliances with European nations. Neither is there any obvious benefit to allowing Elon Musk, along with the rogue's gallery of eminently unqualified and morally deficient Trump appointees, to decimate and, in some cases, destroy federal agencies.

Does it benefit the U.S. to have no flu vaccine next year? Veteran journalist Jonathan Broder reported that U.S. intelligence operatives worry that a recent agreement by the Trump administration to re-open Russia's embassy in the U.S. will bring an influx of spies that will be difficult for America's battered intelligence apparatus to track and combat. Now, as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes, the Trump administration is risking an economic downturn with a toxic mix of DOGE layoffs, tariffs, and rumbling uncertainty.

Who benefits? Is Trump merely stupid or is he, as so many suspect, a Russian asset? The latter may not be as outlandish as it sounds. Here is what John Sipher, a former CIA Senior Intellience Service officer wrote in Just Security:

One wag on X had a simpler explanation: "It's not impossible to understand. Putin can give Trump something that almost no other leader can give him: full cooperation in turning the US into a monarchy. He won't get that from any of our allies."

The notion of Trump as useful idiot brings up the question of motivation for Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, and Vance's sponsor, libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel. They may be idiots, by our standards, but they are not as ignorant as Trump. Why are they colluding in the hollowing out of the U.S.?

The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last wrote that Thiel and the other tech broligarchs are believers in the winner-take-all version of monopoly capitalism created by the Internet. The assumption is that an authoritarian government will give them the competitive advantages to which they have become accustomed, no matter the cost to anyone who is not a Master of the Universe. Last makes a plausible case, using Thiel’s arguments in his book Zero to One. The end point of autocracies, however, is that they fall, and do so dramatically. By then, perhaps the Master Race plans to be living on another planet.

There is no immediate silver lining, but pragmatically, Marc Cooper suggests that Friday's grotesque display could mean increased support for Ukraine by Europe. That appeared to be in the cards already, but perhaps the sense of crisis will speed things along. It can't happen too soon. Here are some reactions after the White House meeting.

“For all that was awful—and awful is not a strong enough term—about the Trump team’s display in the Oval Office today, one wonderful and necessary thing happened: Zelensky stood up to Trump and Vance. He spoke truth to their arrogance and power. He did not defer to their need to be obeyed, their insistence on not being contradicted, their demand to be given everything while giving nothing in return. It is the only such instance we’ve seen of this sort of courage, and we could use more of it, especially from those in our own Congress and state leadership.

“I hope Ukrainians are proud of Zelensky. There was only one true leader in that room today, and it was the one who wasn’t wearing a suit.”

There are moments in history where you can feel the tectonic plates of power shifting under your feet, the precise seconds when empires declare themselves rotten and ready to collapse. February 28, 2025, was one of those moments—a grotesque display of unchecked narcissism, geopolitical idiocy, and the full-throttle transformation of American foreign policy into a goddamn mafia shakedown.

Donald Trump, the world’s loudest and dumbest charlatan, decided to hold a public execution of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, not with bullets, but with bullying. This was not diplomacy. This was not strategy. This was the kind of goonish humiliation typically reserved for reality television, except now the stakes were measured in millions of lives and the looming specter of World War III.

Trump—flanked by his gaslighting yes-man JD Vance and an eerily silent Marco Rubio—welcomed Zelenskyy to the Oval Office only to berate, belittle, and ultimately dismiss him like a waiter who forgot to refill his Diet Coke. The Ukrainian president had made the grave mistake of advocating for his people, for his country, for his soldiers dying daily on the front lines against Russian invaders. But in Trump’s world, there is no room for dignity or resistance—only total submission to the Don.

"You’re gambling with World War III," Trump barked at Zelenskyy, acting like a discount Tony Soprano shaking down a local shopkeeper. "You either make a deal, or we are out." The message was crystal clear: Surrender to Putin, or America lets you rot.

When Zelenskyy pushed back—trying to explain, like a rational human being, that diplomacy requires more than rolling over and exposing your belly to a psychotic autocrat like Vladimir Putin—Vance chimed in, whining that it was "disrespectful" to discuss such things in front of the American media. Disrespectful! As if the real problem here was the optics, not the grotesque moral betrayal unfolding in real time.

"Have you ever said thank you once?" Vance sneered at Zelenskyy, echoing his master’s worldview that all human interactions are transactional.* "You have to be thankful," Trump added, "you don’t have the cards. You’re buried there."

This is what American diplomacy has become: an extortion racket.

Forget alliances, forget history, forget standing up to despots—Trump views everything through the lens of a cheap con artist running a rigged casino. Ukraine, in his mind, is a desperate gambler, and Trump is the pit boss deciding whether to extend another round of credit.

If Zelenskyy had gotten on his knees and kissed Trump’s golden slippers, maybe he’d have left with something. But instead, he left with nothing, because he had the audacity to act like the elected leader of a sovereign nation, rather than a groveling servant.

After the carnage, Trump did what he always does: He took to Truth Social to declare victory.

"I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace," he wrote, as if the real issue is Ukraine’s unwillingness to surrender, rather than Russia’s ongoing campaign of war crimes and territorial theft.

The joint press conference was canceled—which in diplomatic terms is the equivalent of overturning the table and storming out of the restaurant. Zelenskyy was seen leaving the White House, no deal signed, no support secured. Just the bitter taste of betrayal in his mouth.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian ambassador literally facepalmed in the middle of the meeting. She couldn’t even hide her disgust. This was the international equivalent of watching your boss drunkenly scream at a client in a meeting while you rub your temples and quietly plan your resignation.

This is all part of a deliberate pivot in American foreign policy. Trump has always sided with Russia, whether it’s calling Putin "a very smart guy," ignoring his war crimes, or pretending Ukraine started the war. Now, his administration is pushing a so-called "peace plan" that amounts to a glorified land grab for Moscow.

The Wall Street Journal has already reported that Trump’s advisers are split on how exactly to force Ukraine to submit. Some want a "frozen conflict"—which translates to "Russia keeps what it stole"—while others are pushing for a formal deal that outright cedes Ukrainian land and resources to Putin. Either way, the outcome is the same: Ukraine loses, Russia wins, and Trump gets to preen about his ‘deal-making.’

The entire world saw this Oval Office debacle. If you’re an ally of the United States, you just learned a very clear lesson: You cannot trust America under Donald Trump. Your security, your sovereignty, and your survival are all secondary to whether Trump personally feels flattered. If you are not groveling at his feet, you’re expendable.

Meanwhile, Putin is watching. And he’s grinning. Because now he knows that Trump will do his dirty work for him.

Zelenskyy was just the first ally to be fed to the wolves. He won’t be the last.

Welcome to America, 2025. This is what losing looks like.

* Zelenskyy had thanked Trump and the American people that very morning.

This post first appeared on Facebook on the Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge page. Their Substack is called, simply, Closer to the Edge. We took the liberty of reprinting it because the authors don't use their names, making it hard to get permission as we generally do even though public posts are fair game. We applaud the authors, who are doing their best to invoke the gonzo journalism of the great Hunter S. Thompson. We're also fans of The Alt Media, a witty, perspicacious, and obscenity-laden news roundup on Substack written by Adam Parkhomenko and Sam Youngman.

If he were still alive and writing, Hunter S. Thompson wouldn't have to exaggerate.