Dead Man’s Hand

What’s left for Zelensky after his shocking White House appearance?

What a remarkable encounter. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

The Zelensky summit at the White House, if it could be called that, made for quite the spectacle. It was clear that there would be disagreements, but for them to be aired in such a way, publicly, in front of the world’s press—well, has there ever been anything like it?

A televised shouting match between the President of the United States and the leader of an allied nation. An allied nation that’s relying, desperately, on the goodwill and support of the United States for its very survival.

Imagine Roosevelt and Churchill duking it out on a Pathé newsreel.

No, I don’t think so.

A shouting match—in truth, it was no such thing. It wasn’t just about volume or aggression. The points were well made, and their truth rang out, at least on the American side. Zelensky is in no position to dictate terms to the United States, not any more, if indeed he ever was. The situation has changed. Ukraine is bogged down, struggling—valiantly, yes, but still struggling—and the United States no longer wants or needs to prolong the war to achieve its geostrategic aims.

Of course, the mainstream media wants to portray this incident as yet another outrage perpetrated by America’s most outrageous president, a man whose manners aren’t fit for the dinner table, let alone the four-legged piece of furniture where negotiations between states take place. Or it was JD Vance’s fault, that hillbilly upstart—the chap the Democrats tried to tell you was “weird” when their candidate for VP was pogoing around on stage to John Mellencamp and pretending he’d never cooked with spices before. The guy who gave his teenage son a bowl cut and made him go “full retard” for sympathy. That guy. Tim Something-or-Other.

So it’s worth watching the full encounter, running to around 45 minutes, if only to see that, no, it wasn’t President Trump or Vice President Vance who took the lead in dragging the whole thing down into the black Ukrainian mud. It was President Zelensky.

It’s not like this was the first time either. Zelensky has form. He’s been accused before of being thoroughly ungrateful for Western aid and angering his allies, including President Biden. His charmless behavior almost scuppered the 2023 NATO summit. That same year, Biden ended up shouting down the phone at him when news of the latest billion-dollar round of US aid was greeted with the sullen ingratitude of a spotty teenager who just wants more, more, more.

People say a good proportion of the aid that’s sent to Ukraine goes up Zelensky’s nose in powdered form and, frankly, judging from his demeanor as he sat in the Oval Office—listless, shifty, eyes darting here and there, hands never still—I could believe a large shipment was delivered to one of the Presidential nostrils not long before he entered the White House. (Incidentally: Nobody has ever asked whether the cocaine found in the White House was actually Zelensky’s, not Hunter Biden’s, from one of his multiple diplomatic visits to the capital between 2022 and 2024. Just a thought.)

Anyway, it took about 40 minutes for the conversation to turn south, and it was Zelensky who did the turning. He was clearly growing agitated after President Trump’s repeated insistence that he wants a peaceful resolution to the war, and then Vice President Vance stepped in to explain the difference in attitude between the Biden and Trump administrations.

Cue fireworks.