Zelensky will not be alone
Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make his second visit to the White House on Monday with the daunting task of reversing the damage done to Ukraine’s security prospects by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.
Zelenskyy will not, however, be alone as he was on his first trip to the White House in February when he was ambushed and humiliated by Donald Trump and the vice-president, JD Vance, who sought to bully him into capitulation to Moscow’s demands.
This time the Ukrainian leader comes to Washington flanked by a dream team of European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron, who combine economic and military clout with proven rapport with Trump.
Also, unlike Trump, they’re not stupid.
It’s naive of me, I suppose, but I keep being surprised by how easily Trump wins everything when he is such a vacuum. He’s an overstuffed clown doll who can’t utter an adult sentence, but he wins anyway. Wah.
Their mission will be to try to use their individual and combined influence to coax the president out of the pro-Russian positions he adopted after just a couple of hours under Putin’s sway in the sub-Arctic on Friday.
And no doubt they will fail, because Trump is Magic. Can they at least make him look bad? Please?
“A lot of people have learned the lessons of Trump, in terms of how you handle him,” said Kim Darroch, who was the UK ambassador to Washington in Trump’s first term. “There will be a lot of flattery. It’s tiresome but it’s necessary: it gets you to first base. You tell him how well he’s doing, how glad everyone is that he is leading the west to find a solution to the war. But then you get on to the substance.”
How embarrassing is that? You have to flatter him, because he’s a giant baby too stupid to know that the flattery is not 100% sincere.
The fact that all these leaders have cleared their diaries to fly to Washington at short notice is a measure of how alarmed they were by Friday’s Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage. The Russian president, wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes in the wake of his unprovoked full invasion of Ukraine, was feted with a red carpet and a personal round of applause from Trump, who allowed him to speak first after the truncated abortive meeting and abruptly dropped his previous insistence on a ceasefire.
Revisit the personal round of applause:
Don’t dscount Trump’s thuggishness in trying to understand his victories. He makes it very clear he will attempt to destroy whoever is currently opposing him most effectively. That target then decides to step back and let someone else take the fore, who then becomes Trump’s new #1 target. Everyone wants to see him go down, but no one wants to be the one to martyr their political future (or their country’s economic standing) in the process.
Now, this will only last until he faces a genuinely united front, but so far that hasn’t happened. For instance, if, at the start of his term, the various Eurozone nations, including Great Britain, and also including Canada and Mexico, had all signed a treaty stating that a tariff against any of them would be responded to with an equivalent tariff from all against the US, then Trump would’ve had to back down, or, alternately, the US would become economically isolated from 2/3ds of the financial market. But instead, they let him ‘negotiate’ (read: bully) one-on-one for the most part, and all of them individually caved in order to diminish the size of the tariffs overall against their country only.