Zelensky tries grandstanding for the cameras and attacking the President of the United States; that would have worked with the former occupant of the oval office; now? Not so much.
/What the Heck Was Zelensky Thinking?
Bonchie:
Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Oval Office on Friday, and as RedState reported, things blew up in spectacular fashion. The latest reports are that the Ukrainian president was kicked out of the White House, with the prior negotiated mineral rights for aid deal shelved indefinitely.
So what exactly happened? That's a good question because I have no idea what Zelensky was thinking. This was not a situation where President Donald Trump was beating him over the head or demanding he submit to a specific narrative surrounding the war in Ukraine. On the contrary, the meeting was essentially over when Zelensky decided it'd be a great idea to try to publicly embarrass Trump and Vice President JD Vance in front of the press.
The sticking point appeared to be Vance, who was wrapping up the press conference, mentioning diplomacy being a means to end the war. Zelensky, for whatever reason, took great offense at that suggestion and asked the vice president if he could ask him a question. The Ukrainian president then leaned forward and began to dismiss the idea of a ceasefire, citing deals that Russia has broken in the past. That's when things touched off, with Zelensky and Vance going back and forth.
VANCE: I'm talking about the kind of diplomacy that's going to end the destruction of your country... Mr. President, with respect, I think it's disrespectful for you to come into 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 that you say what problems we have?
VANCE: I've actually watched and seen the stories, and I know what happens is you bring people, you bring them on a propaganda tour, Mr. President. Do you disagree that you've had problems bringing people into 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?
ZELENSKY: First of all, during the war, everybody has problems. Even you. But you have nice ocean and don't feel now. but you will feel it in the future. God bless, you won't have war.
It was that last line that brought Trump back into the conversation, likely because it felt as if Zelensky was threatening the United States.
TRUMP: Don't tell us what we going to feel. We trying to solve a problem. Don't tell us what we going to feel, because you in no position to dictate that. Remember this. You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel.
This was a colossal miscalculation by Zelensky. Trump has never accepted the idea that Ukraine is doing the United States a favor by fighting Russia as a way of justifying unlimited aid. Perhaps Joe Biden found that argument persuasive, but Joe Biden is not in office anymore. Russia is not going to invade the United States or any NATO country (if for no other reason than a lack of capability), and using that as a type of blackmail for support was never going to play.
Here's the deal. Fairness or being "right" doesn't factor into a situation like this. Zelensky is in a desperate spot, and Trump had largely acquiesced to a very Ukraine-friendly deal over the last few days (including lowering the repayment amount to just $90 billion). The negotiations were over. All the Ukrainian president had to do was show up, shake hands, smile for the cameras, and sign the deal. His attempt to lecture Trump and Vance for the cameras was an ego move that he didn't have the leverage to pull off.
Trump does not care about the press. You aren't going to bully him into a certain point of view by appealing to CNN or any other legacy news outlet. Whether that's fair or not is irrelevant. What's relevant is the reality of the moment, and Zelensky chose to pick a fight with Vance when it was completely unnecessary. Liz Cheney and David Frum may do performative outrage online, but they are not going to cut a check to Ukraine. Zelensky needed this deal and chose to blow it up for no good reason. What was the point of him even coming to the White House if he was going to publicly denounce any possible ceasefire?
What this really comes down to is how Zelensky handled this. If he has issues with Trump negotiating a deal with Putin, then he should express those behind closed doors, which is something Vance pointed out during the exchange. By trying to embarrass and undermine the U.S. president in public, he destroyed an already frayed relationship. In doing so, he might have cost his country its war.
Of course, our Native Embarrassment rushed to put himself in front of the cameras to denounce this grievous betrayal of our most loyal ally and to pull out once again, ho-hum, the Russia conspiracy trope:
Our state’s ambitious lightweight has been positioning himself to run for the presidential nomination since he first crawled out from the muck of local politics (well, sooner than that, actually) and it’s working, so far as his naturally constituency of mouthbreathers and retards is concerned:
By Annie Karni
Reporting from the Capitol
Feb. 23, 2025
As Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, sat seething in his office last month watching President Trump blame diversity requirements at the Federal Aviation Administration for the deadly plane crash over the Potomac River, members of his staff warned him against publicly venting his rage.
The midair collision had happened less than 12 hours earlier, they reminded him; bodies were still in the water and families were still being notified about the deaths of loved ones. Perhaps it would be more befitting of a U.S. senator to be respectful of the tragedy and all of its unknowns, rather than seize the political moment and respond?
Mr. Murphy had no time for that.
“Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you — deliberately lying to you,” he said in an impassioned video he recorded and posted within 30 minutes of Mr. Trump’s news conference. “Every single senator and member of Congress should call him out for how disgraceful it was.”
Many did, but none managed to do so quite as quickly or concisely as Mr. Murphy, 51, who has seemed to be everywhere, all at once, since Inauguration Day, staging a loud and constant resistance to Mr. Trump at a time when Democrats are struggling to figure out how to respond to him.
Mr. Murphy, a career politician who rose to national prominence as a gun safety advocate after the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., has emerged in the opening weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term as one of the most effective Democratic communicators pushing back against a president unbound.
In two-minute videos on social media, which he records from his office on Capitol Hill; an almost constant stream of posts on X; passionate floor speeches; and essays he writes on his Substack, Mr. Murphy is attempting to explain in digestible sound bites that what is happening in Washington is very simple: It’s a billionaire takeover of American democracy.
Mr. Murphy in 2013 with activists against gun violence. He rose to national prominence as a gun safety advocate after the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn.Credit...Rod Lamkey/Getty Images
He is also seizing a political opportunity to position himself as a future national leader for Democrats who find themselves deep in the wilderness as they seek a strategy for simultaneously rebuilding their party and resisting Mr. Trump.
“It’s an overwhelming moment,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview on Wednesday in his office on Capitol Hill. “Our political brand is fundamentally broken, the rule of law is disintegrating and a lot of people still don’t know what Trump’s actual agenda is.”
Mr. Murphy has spent the past three years immersing himself in the literature and ideas of the “new right,” listening to the podcast “Red Scare” and reading thought leaders like Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Deneen. He credits that immersion for his being prepared for Mr. Trump’s return to power.
“It gave me a window into how thoughtful they were being to make sure they were ready on Day 1,” he said.
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said that Mr. Murphy has been meeting the moment “when too many Democratic elected officials seem several steps behind. He’s providing Democrats with a messaging blueprint for how to take on Trump and Musk and win back working-class voters.”
Mr. Murphy, who is aging out of the “boy wonder” phase of his political career (he was 33 when first elected to the House), is not exactly charismatic; he is cerebral and serious. At a recent news conference, he did not crack a smile when Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, made corny jokes about his grandson losing his first tooth, waiting them out stone-faced until it was his turn to speak.
The comedian Hasan Minhaj recently described him as having the look of a McKinsey consultant, “just blending into congressional crowds of white men like an arctic fox.”
At times, Mr. Murphy can sound like a high school history teacher giving a civics lesson.
“Dictators and despots, they use law enforcement to try and compel loyalty,” he said in one video, explaining why people needed to care that the Justice Department had dropped its charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. “They threaten you with arrest if you’re not loyal; they will let you get away with crimes if you are loyal. That’s what’s happening in America today.”
But a constitutional crisis can offer an opportunity for a civics refresher, and Mr. Murphy appears to be breaking through.
So sayeth the echo chamber.