Over the past week, Donald Trump has been talking himself into becoming an enemy of Ukraine. It seems he needs to feel this way in order for him to do what he wants to do, which is impose terms of surrender on a sovereign nation that committed the crime—in his eyes now—of refusing to allow Russia to take it over.
That is the only logical way to understand Trump’s utterly despicable comments this afternoon. Annoyed, apparently, that Ukraine’s democratically elected leader objected to negotiations to which he was not invited—negotiations over a war in which he is one of the two combatants—Trump literally blamed him and the country he leads for the war itself. “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it—three years. You should have never been there. You should have never started it. You should have made a deal.”
You should never have started it. What madness, what cravenness, what repulsive factitiousness, is this? Volodymyr Zelenskyy offended him by raising the perfectly logical problem of a negotiation that included him out, and so Trump began talking about Ukraine’s leader as though he were Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who hasn’t permitted a vote on his leadership in two decades. “Well, we haven’t had an election there,” Trump said by way of explaining why he is insisting that Ukraine go to the polls as part of the peace deal Ukraine is not even involved with! We all assumed this was a Putin condition, but no, Trump said it was his idea. Zelenskyy became president of Ukraine in 2019. He was elected to a five-year term. The Russians invaded in February 2022. Generally speaking, it’s very difficult to hold an election when your country is fending off a near-genocidal action against it, and in any case, there was no requirement that there even be an election under peacetime Ukrainian law Yes, the U.S. had an election during World War II, but we weren’t a battleground.
Anyway, what does Trump care whether there are elections there or not? His claim is effectively that Zelenskyy is illegitimate; according to Trump, Zelenskyy has a 4 percent approval rating. That’s a near-psychotic lie. The last poll, for whatever a poll in the middle of a war is worth, had the Ukrainian leader at 52 percent. Trump wants an election there because he feels Zelenskyy is standing in the way of his effort to see that people stop being killed in this war. He objects to Ukraine being under martial law. What does the word “martial” mean, Mr. President? Ever bother to look it up? Ukraine has a significant population that might be loyal to the invading enemy, and it has reserved its rights to defend itself from fifth columns. As every country in a war does, and has ever done, forever. Indeed, the Ukrainian constitution literally creates an election exception under conditions of martial law; not only are elections not to be held under its terms, but once martial law is lifted, there is to be no election for six months. As the scholar Elena Davlikanova explains, “Several laws would need to be changed in order for presidential elections to be held, which raises its own problems. Even if a legal solution could be found, security, financial, and organizational obstacles to holding free, fair, and representative elections are far more serious.”
It is not for Trump to decide whether Ukraine continues to defend its territory and its sovereignty. He is, of course, within his mandate as president to cut off aid, and thereby make the war sputter out—in order to make the Ukrainians suffer for their disobedience in refusing to walk quietly to the gallows while thanking him as they are hanged in the worldwide public square.
In the 1970s, the United States cut out the South Vietnamese as Washington pursed peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. But that was a war in which we became the primary combatants ourselves, losing north of 50,000 men by the time those talks were fully in earnest. What have we done. We have sold Ukraine arms, or given Ukraine military aid, most of which came in the form of weaponry built in the United States, therefore serving as a form of domestic industrial policy that employed U.S. workers. We have not lost a single life in Ukraine. We haven’t had a single boot on the ground in Ukraine. Trump is moving in to impose a deal as though this war is something from which we need to escape. We don’t. It’s just that he’s spent years talking about how it wouldn’t have happened on his watch and can settle it in a day, and now basically he’s decided the best way to do that is to make Ukraine the warmonger in his own head.
Trump is under no obligation to support Ukraine. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. But doing so while accusing Ukraine of being the aggressor in the most unjustified, pitiless, and brutal war of aggression in our time is an act of infamy almost without parallel. I wrote COMMENTARY’s current cover story. It’s called “Trump 2: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” This is the ugly. This is the more-than-ugly. This is about as ugly as it could possibly get.
