The Trump-Zelensky meeting of February 28, 2025 will go down as one of the dumbest, most infuriating, most avoidable foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. And in the aftermath of a disaster, you have to start asking questions. How does one learn the art of Trumpian de-escalation? And how does one irritate their biggest benefactor in the most streamlined way possible? All this and more on this month’s installment of “it’s gonna be a rough four years.” There will be more.

The Course of Events

Very briefly, I want to summarize the events of the meeting. Essentially, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to fly to Washington D.C., go to the White House, hold a press conference with President Trump, discuss the potential for peace, sign a deal for U.S. rights to Ukrainian minerals, and fly home. That is not how it went.

Instead, Zelensky made a series of little comments that irritated President Trump and VP Vance throughout the meeting. And then the President engaged. Oh boy did he engage. President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance proceeded to start a shouting match for the entire world to see. Trump gave Zelensky flak for not wearing a suit (which he does out of respect for his soldiers), for “gambling World War 3,” and for all sorts of other baseless and meaningless nonsense. As the cameras rolled, Trump and Vance conducted themselves like six year olds, firing petty insults at a man who had badly miscalculated his leverage.

Why?

To tell you the truth, I’ve got no idea why the Commander-in-Chief would do this, nor any idea why Zelensky thought incurring the wrath of The Donald was a good idea. There’s simply no reason even approaching validity for either of them. But I suppose I can give you some invalid reasons.

Reportedly, Zelensky had irritated Trump a couple different times prior to this. He publicly rejected the U.S. offer of access to Ukrainian minerals in exchange for U.S. security guarantees instead of doing so privately, for example. Trump also, of course, had a public twitter feud with Zelensky in which he called the Ukrainian president “a dictator” and a “moderately successful comedian,” while Zelensky said Trump lived in “disinformation space.”

Let me be clear. Zelensky’s rejection of the minerals-for-security deal was idiotic. He should have never done something like that. The deal, while not good for Ukraine, was as good as they were going to get, while rejecting it was inevitably going to incur the wrath of Trump. And his little comments and prior snuffings of U.S. diplomatic staff were disrespectful, and miscalculated.

But you will note that prior diplomatic blunders, petty personal feuds, and minor embarrassing comments by Zelensky don’t exactly justify a shouting match in the Oval Office. This is the West Wing, not the 3rd grade. These antics invite strife. These antics invite Russian aggression. These antics are a disgrace.

What’s the Big Deal?

So what are the ripple effects of this spat? They’re hard to quantify, but I can confidently say they aren’t going to pan out well.

The Daylight Problem

When you put daylight between yourself and an ally, you invite bad actors to take advantage of that gap. You invite them to use a metaphorical crowbar to separate the two nations. This applies to Ukraine just as much as it does to Taiwan or Israel. Let me put it in those terms, seeing as the conservative population of this school is more anti-Iran or anti-China than anti-Russia:

When the United States said to Israel that it was “threatening Middle-Eastern stability” by conducting its counter-terror campaign in Gaza, Hamas saw an opportunity. They saw a chance to survive because the U.S. had shown division in its alliance, and because the Israelis were coming under pressure from their biggest ally. That’s how you incentivize terrorism, as I’ve been shouting incessantly for a year-and-a-half.

If the United States were to say to Taiwan, “Sorry buddy. We know you’ve been holding the line against the commies for the last 76 years, but America First means those F-16s you ordered aren’t arriving any time soon,” that would be an extraordinarily enticing welcome mat for any Chinese Marines landing on that island. There is no better way to sabotage the fight against socialism than to pull a move like that.

Division is how you sabotage yourself. So when Donald Trump called Zelensky a dictator while outright refusing to label Putin similarly, he did massive damage to our efforts in  ensuring an occupation-free Ukraine. He invited the Russians to push harder in a potential peace deal because they saw weakness. Why shouldn’t Putin push for occupying Zaporizhia in a deal? If you give these people an inch, they demand a mile. And Trump just yielded a great many inches.

The Minor Matter of Truth

There is, of course, that whole “truth” aspect to be considered. Put simply, Trump’s accusations against Zelensky and free passes to Putin are based on outright lies. To yell at Zelensky while simultaneously defending Putin is nothing short of a betrayal of American values, and a betrayal of truth.

Make no mistake, Putin is one of the most evil men to walk this earth. I want to keep this article down to a tight 10,000 words, so I won’t list all the people he’s had poisoned in excruciating fashion or had thrown out of 30th-story windows, but needless to say, there are many. His troops have raped Ukrainian women en-masse and leave mass-graves wherever they go. His missiles, designed for destroying aircraft carriers, have instead been sent careening into apartment blocks without a military target in sight. He has killed tens of thousands of civilians without cause, and killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers for no valid reason. This is the man Trump won’t call a dictator.

Volodymyr Zelensky, on the other hand, is not a dictator. The best piece of evidence you could point to is his postponing of the 2024 Election when western democracies don’t tend to alter those, even during wartime. But the reason no western democracy has done that is because no western democracy has faced a Russia-level threat during election season. During World War 2, the mainland U.S. was never really under threat. So the 1944 elections went ahead. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln seriously considered cancelling the election, and even then, the Civil War was very much going the Union’s way. The only example of a modern democracy cancelling elections during wartime is Israel, when, for a few days in 1973, it seriously looked like they would fall to Arab invasion. So we can see that the only time a Western country was under that kind of threat during election season, they did postpone elections until the year after. But I don’t see Trump calling Golda Meir a dictator for it.

Zelensky cancelled elections because there is no better way to sabotage the war effort and invite Russian meddling, all while Ukrainian soldiers are dying by the thousands as they fight tooth-and-nail to hold territory without enough artillery, tank, or air support. If Zelensky refuses to hold elections when the war is over, then we can call him a dictator. But we simply don’t have enough evidence at this time to conclude that, and Trump knows it.

Conclusion

In saying these baseless things, Trump and Vance have done significant diplomatic damage, and they ignore the truth in an infuriating and obvious way. Trump lied when he said Zelensky was a dictator, he mixed up the sides when he accused Ukraine of “gambling on WW3,” and he cozied up to Vladimir Putin in his refusal to condemn him on Friday. To round off, both Zelensky and Trump caused this incident. But only one of them started the shouting match.

I can only say the following: Mr. President, you’ve pressured the wrong side.

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