New Pariah in Town: us, the U.S.
Friday's Trump/Vance thug-fest for the cameras has changed everything. We are now our best, most immediate hope.
The Resistant Grandmother (TRG)
The United States has gone from the world’s most trusted leader to the opposite: a democratic outsider now in league with free nations’ worst enemy, Vladimir Putin. It’s as if a once-beloved sheriff has joined forces with the bad guys—which is exactly what happened Friday in the office of the president of the United States.
Solidarity in the moment
Just as the story of Trump and J.D. Vance ganging up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky broke, I was making the finishing touches on a poster for a rally protesting Trump and Musk at the local Tesla dealership. The Oval Office debacle was so dramatic, I was tempted to skip out on that obligation, as I wanted to soak up every horrific and consequential detail of what went down. But I’m glad I did not.
The 90 or so people I stood with for hours in a freezing cold suburban Chicago early evening provided comfort. Holding signs such as “Stand with Ukraine,” “No Oligarch blood money,” “Trump’s a Traitor,” etc., we formed an alliance that helped blunt the sting of the Oval Office debacle, as did the hundreds of rush hour cars honking in support. We were beginning to understand that other people, many, felt the same: Donald Trump was a dangerous president destroying what was good about America. And he had now turned his sights on the heroic president of Ukraine.
So it was reassurimg to be among a coalition of kindred spirits: teachers (retired or active), insurance underwriters, nurses, retired garbage workers, spouses, and others who were forming the beginnings of an important resistance to the man and his administration that had betrayed us so dramatically that day.
Everything’s different
The world changed in Friday’s 139-minute standoff. Unlike any meeting that’s ever occurred in the inner sanctum of American democracy, a Churchillian figure who has led his country’s defense against an illegal invasion triggered by Vladimir Putin was demeaned and insulted by an American president and vice president who defended the world’s most dangerous international predator of the modern age, and who has now under Trump become America’s friend.
In front of reporters from the U.S. and around the world, the 47th president broke from an 80-year-old geopolitical model that has kept the world free from Russian expansion, until Putin’s 2022 Ukraine invasion, and traded it in for an allegiance with a dictator, something antithetical to the country’s nearly 250-year-old history. What the Resistant Grandmother feared would happen for her two, young, beautiful grandchildren—an authoritarian government with its requisite authoritarian allies— had all too suddenly come to pass.
Whatever he damned well pleased
The new world order Trump created on Friday not only puts the U.S. in Putin’s corner, by extension it separates us from our western allies and involves us with his anti-western bedfellows: China, North Korea, Hungary, and any other of the world’s most nefarious bad actors. The country that made the world safe for democracy in two world wars and developed and implemented the Marshall Plan, that enabled Europe to recover from war, free and prosperous, was now making the world safe only for Putin, Hitler’s most dangerous modern legatee.
The set piece for the dissolution of the American fidelity to the western alliance was none other than what had been the nucleus of democracy: the American president’s office in the White House.
There, where Franklin Roosevelt partnered with Winston Churchill to thwart German nationalist plans to conquer Europe, sat today’s version of a nationalistic leader very much like Mussolini, a fawning lapdog who enslaved his own people and enabled Hitler to do whatever he damned well pleased.
“We’re going to get a lot of money in the future”: Trump
With Secretary of State Marco Rubio, formerly a strong Ukraine supporter, having sunk into the soft recesses of Trump’s yellow couch and saying nothing, Trump and Vance held court not unlike the autocrats of old.
They denigrated, insulted, constantly interrupted, and generally denied their distinguished guest the chance to speak for himself in any sustained way. Suddenly, the young hero-president of the country invaded three years ago by its brutal neighbor to the east was reduced to a punching bag for the pugnacious Trump and Vance. All because he refused to sign an agreement that surrendered his mineral deposits to a group jointly managed by Donald Trump’s U.S. and Ukraine and which absolved the aggressor Russia from any damages. Most importantly, it failed to include the security agreement Ukraine desperately sought. Without it, there was nothing to keep Russia from invading Ukraine again with no reliable American promise to help.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bi-partisan, non-profit policy research organization, the Trump cease-fire deal, while “bold,” was also risky from the start. And all the risk fell on Ukraine.
Such a deal
The deal called for Ukraine to use its mineral resources to repay the U.S.’s $500B expenditures on military equipment. According to the CSIS, the major flaw of the agreement—the one Trump tried to strong-arm Zelensky to sign on Friday—was that it “did not include a security agreement for Ukraine” (Feb. 20, csis.org).
Rather, it spelled out a “recovery investment fund with joint U.S.-Ukrainian ownership” where Ukraine is on the hook for “50 percent of all revenues.” Such an agreement, created by the U.S. and Russia without Ukrainian involvement, was, to the CSIS, doomed to failure as “all negotiations must involve Kyiv,” but did not.
Was it any surprise that a deal that turned over Ukrainian minerals to Putin-friendly Trump where there’s nothing in writing that will protect the country from more Russian aggression while the U.S., given the Trump-Putin alliance, may look the other way, was a loser for Zelensky’s war-torn land from the start?
Trump: “We’re going to get a lot of money in the future”
Because of Zelensky’s refusal, Trump turned to his default mode of conducting human relationships: bullying, the absence of self-reflection, and abuse. “You’re gambling with World War III right now!” Trump bellowed, apparently unaware his bad treatment of the Ukrainian war hero and fawning subservience to Putin was more likely to do that than Zelensky’s defense of country.
In true authoritarian fashion, Trump for days had touted the Zelinsky meeting without apparently getting an agreement from the Ukrainian president.
According to BBC news, Trump’s pre-meeting hype described Zelensky coming to the White House to sign a “very big agreement.” In the language more like an extortion agreement than a security pact with a close ally, Trump said: “We’ve been able to make a deal where we’re going to get our money back, and we’re going to get a lot of money in the future” (Feb. 26, bbc.com).
Not even one sentence on security
While then promising to “make a deal with Russia and Ukraine to ‘stop killing people’”—language suggesting Ukrainians were just as guilty as the Russians in causing death—Trump failed to mention the agreement would not address Zelinsky’s number one concern: security guarantees backed up by the United States.
The BBC quoted Zelensky as saying, it was “important that at least a sentence” on security was included. But when Zelensky arrived in the Oval Office, he found no such guarantees.
The drama of the gifted freedom fighter
Maybe if Kyiv had been part of the negotiations, things would have turned out differently. The Oval Office standoff followed days of talks between the United States and Russia, in Saudi Arabia, a country symbolically friendly to Russians and Trump. Missing were representatives of the country with the most at stake, Ukraine.
But from the time Trump’s and his foreign policy team took over in January, they’ve treated Zelensky as a side player in an international game of deciding Ukraine’s future. Instead, in the cat bird’s seat was Russia. Importantly, it’s the country that has destroyed Ukrainainan cities, awarded its soldiers for raping women in front of their children and vice versa, kidnapping Ukrainian children for adoption by Russian parents, destroying Ukrainian infrastructure, and breaking cease-fire agreements with impunity.
Trump’s apparent desire to believe he could bully Ukraine into submission convinced him he could make Zelensky eventually bend his knee, as so many have done and are still doing to Trump.
And so it was not unexpected that once Zelensky arrived at the White House without his most serious demand—security guarantees—the whole signing the agreement shtik was bound to explode in everyone’s face, and did.
A den of lies and abuse
It should hardly be surprising that Zelensky, a man of heroic stature since mobilizing his country to stave off Russian aggression since February 2022, would not go quietly into the dark night of Trump’s non-transparent, Putin-friendly foreign policy den.
In a press-opportunity that may have been designed with an underlying reason to make it hard for the Ukrainian president to say no to the security assurances-free cease-fire package, all hell broke loose with Vice President J.D. Vance ponying up to take the opening jabs.
Facts vs. layers of lies
According to a transcript of what happened in the Oval Office as published by the Associated Press (AP), the conversation began with Trump and Vance berating Zelensky for not showing sufficient gratitude to the U.S. for its support in the war, even in face of multiple recorded and videotape examples of the Ukrainian leader’s effusively thanking America at least 33 times over the last three years (28 Feb., cnn.com).
After falsely claiming Trump’s two immediate predecessors did nothing to support Ukraine, Vance incorrectly stated that Trump’s was the only administration that ever helped the beleaguered country, forgetting the 2019 incident where Trump tried to extort dirt on Joe Biden from Zelensky to use in the 2020 presidential campaign. Only herculean attempts by the Democratic U.S. Congress arranged for the cache of weapons, purchased by the Ukrainians, to make its way to Kyiv.
Also, an Associated Press fact check of Trump’s 2022 similar accusations found them to be full of falsehoods. While it was true that Obama in 2014 did not offer military aid to Ukraine after the Russian Crimea invasion and annexation, fearing inciting further Russian aggression against a fledgling Ukrainian democratic government, Obama had provided more than $120M and $75M in a range of military and security aid, such as counter–mortar radars, night vision equipment, Humvees, and medical supplies.
Under Biden, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute, which tracks aid going into Ukraine, the U.S. spent $119B on aid between January 2022, starting just before the Russian February invasion, to December 2024 just before Biden left office (Feb. 27, bbc.com). Plus, Biden’s quick response to the invasion and leadership in coalescing a European-U.S. alliance to thwart Russia, has universally been considered key to Ukraine’s ability to hold Russia at bay for three years.
Did Trump make a $300-350B contribution in aid to Ukraine:? A BBC investigation has found no evidence to back up that claim (Feb. 27, 2025, bbc.com).
Trump’s attack dog
But untruths didn’t stop Vance from loudly and falsely accosting Zelinsky for being insufficiently appreciative for all Trump’s America has done.
VANCE: Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this (the need for security guarantees) in front of the American media.
Then Vance denigrated the Ukrainian war effort, in so many words describing it as pathetic while somehow glossing over how that same country had successfully held off the advances of a country seven times its size for the last three years.
VANCE: 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… Do you agree you’ve had problems bringing in people to your military?”
Later, Trump himself became even more graphic, drilling down with games-of-chance analogies, a cringe-worthy analogy given all six Trump gambling casinos
having gone belly up.
TRUMP: You haven’t got the cards right now. With us, you’ve got the cards.”...
ZELENSKY: I’m not playing cards…
What FDR did not say…
The Vance/Trump approach of denigrating an ally on the world stage would be akin to President Roosevelt telling Churchill on the radio in 1941, “You guys are going around dragging any warm body you can find into the RAF. You know they’re just fodder for the Nazis. You’re running low on flyers. We’re lending you all this food, oil, and material, and you won’t settle for a cease-fire? You don’t have the cards. I tell you, if you can get a cease fire right now, I tell you, you take it so that your men stop (sic) getting killed.
We can be grateful FDR took a different tack and worked in respectful partnership with Churchill, a joint effort that won World War II.
Trump goes full-on Putin
Trump ended the one-sided conversation in a confusing, rambling rant that white-washed Russia and proved his allegiance to the man who poses the greatest threat to freedom and democracy since Hitler.
It began with Vance having, embarrassingly, to restate a reporter’s question that got to the heart of Zelensky’s refusal. REPORTER: “What will the U.S. do if Russia breaks the ceasefire?”
TRUMP: (in a rambling response that disrespected the reporter and two generations of U.S. presidents) What, if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now? OK, what if they broke it? I don’t know, they broke it with Biden because they didn’t respect him. They didn’t respect Obama, They respect me. Let me tell you, Putin went through a lot of hell, of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt,....All I can say is this: He might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken them with Biden. He did, maybe. Maybe he did. I don’t know what happened. But, (citing no evidence) he can’t break them with me. He wants to make a deal. I don’t know if you can make a deal….
… All right, I think we’ve seen enough. What do you think? This is going to be great television, I will say that.”
Abuse as governance
In a way, it’s not surprising to see Trump abuse a heroic world leader, as it tracks with a career-filled history of abusive statements about America itself and its often-heroic legacy, which he denigrates so as to elevate himself.
What’s next?
How Americans respond to the Feb. 28 debacle will determine the country’s future and ultimately wrest the country from Trump’s authoritarian grip.
Trump’s America is not the one I want for my curious, happy, brilliant six-year-old granddaughter and three-year-old grandson, full of the kind of promise that only a free country can nurture.
That’s why at yesterday’s protest at a suburban Chicago Tesla dealership and others, I take the only comfort I’ve felt since Trump took the oath of office he’s violated consistently since Inauguration Day.
My fellow protestors and I exchanged information on how to resist and find other protests, which I have shared in links below. Even in the darkness and cold following the Trump/Vance thuggery in the Oval, we felt safe in our passion, collegiality, and the cars honking in solidarity with our purpose. We were exercising our freedom of speech and assembly, and promising to do more—together, wherever we can.
—trg
Updates on protests and volunteer work
https://indivisible.org
https://fiftyfifty.one
https://wisdems.com
(volunteer for upcoming Wis. Supreme Court election)
Fact-checking
Mainstream media
https://nytimes.com
https://washingtonpost.com
https://theguardian.com
https://apnews.com
Other
https://usafacts.org
https://statistica.com
https://sca.isr.umich.edu
(consumer sentiment)
Law updates
https://democracyforward.org
https://www.democracydocket.com
(mark elias site)
https://www.justsecurity.org
https://apnews.com
https://politico.com
https://washingtonpost.com
Who I write for…
: