Trump and Zelensky: How We Got Here

Six ways to understand the U.S./Ukraine clash.

Good morning and welcome to the Sunday issue of Wake Up To Politics, a bonus installment for paid subscribers. In the bottom half of the newsletter, I’ll give recommendations of my favorite pieces of journalism from the past week. But first — some thoughts on Friday’s showdown in the Oval Office.

If you’re reading this, I’m going to go ahead and assume you don’t need me to recap what went down in the Oval Office on Friday between President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Here’s the complete video of the 49-minute meeting, which is worth watching in full if you have some time:

And here are the last 11 minutes, when things really got off the rails, as Zelensky challenged the Americans on how Ukraine could trust Russian president Vladimir Putin as a negotiator, Vance tagged Zelensky as “disrespectful” and ungrateful, and Trump said that Zelensky was “not in a very good position” and “gambling with World War Three”:

In the last few days, a lot of news outlets have presented this clash as unavoidable: the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal have all used the word “inevitable.”

I’m not so sure. In both a micro and a macro sense, it’s not clear to me that this fight was entirely predestined. Per the Washington Post, Trump was in an “upbeat mood” before the sit-down, while White House officials was “expecting a positive meeting” in which Trump and Zelensky would easily approve a bilateral minerals deal. A celebratory lunch was prepared, with menus featuring “closely intertwined American and Ukrainian flags” — a symbol of how close we came to a day of deepening U.S.-Ukraine ties, instead of the reverse. (The lunch ultimately went unserved, just as the minerals deal went unsigned.)

And then, from a bigger-picture view, just as it wasn’t obvious on Friday morning that the meeting would end how it did, it also wasn’t clear at the outset of the Russian invasion that the war in Ukraine would become as domestically divisive in the U.S. as it ultimately did. The very first Ukraine aid package, enacted in May 2022, passed the Senate, 86-11, and the House, 368-57. Some Republican opposition was already apparent, but it was a small minority — a far cry from the reaction Friday, when Republicans responded to the Zelensky meeting with near-universal approval for Trump’s rebuke of the Ukrainian leader. Even a Russia hawk like Lindsey Graham said he had “never been more proud” of Trump.

I’m continually fascinated by which issues in American life became politically polarizing and which do not. The war in Ukraine started in the latter bucket and migrated into the former. How did we end up at Friday’s disastrous meeting? Here are six factors, in no particular order, covering both the the specific factors that led to Friday meeting going off the rails and the larger dynamics that led Republican support for Ukraine to crater:

1. “All foreign policy is personal” was a maxim of Joe Biden’s, and Friday’s sit-down proves it on two levels. On one level, there is the Trump-Zelensky relationship, which had long since been poisoned by negative associations with Trump’s first impeachment (sparked by the leak of a phone call with Zelensky) and on Friday itself took another hit when Zelensky showed up without a suit, as White House officials had requested. (In diplomacy, it’s often the little things.)

And then, on another level, there is the Trump-Putin relationship, which has been a source of enduring mystery since Trump first entered the political arena.