Ukraine has exposed Trump’s true identity: as a vandal, an autocrat, a gangster and a fool; The Guardian, April 25, 2025

 Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian; Ukraine has exposed Trump’s true identity: as a vandal, an autocrat, a gangster and a fool

"Whether Trump succeeds in making Kyiv buckle or not, the new reality is clear. The US president is taking an axe to an international order constructed in the aftermath of a bloody world war, a system that has held, however imperfectly, since 1945. A central tenet of that order was that big states could not simply swallow up smaller ones, that unprovoked aggression and conquest would no longer be allowed to stand. Yet here is Trump bent on rewarding just such an act of conquest, not simply acquiescing in Putin’s land grab in Ukraine but conferring on it the legitimacy of approval by the world’s most powerful nation.

Note how he speaks as if Putin had every right to seize the territory of his neighbour. Asked this week what concessions, if any, he had extracted from Moscow, Trump replied that Putin’s willingness to stop the war, rather than gobbling up Ukraine in its entirety, was a “pretty big concession”.

This is not only a disaster for Ukraine, though it is obviously that. It is also the destruction of global architecture that has stood for many decades – and it is hardly a lone case. Trump’s tariff fetish is similarly upending a system of international trade that had made the world, and especially the US, more prosperous. The consequences are already visible, in plunging global stock markets, gloomy growth forecasts and warnings of a recession that will start in the US and then spread everywhere else.

Trump’s eagerness to acquiesce in Putin’s seizure of Ukraine makes a dead letter of international law, with its prohibition of the crime of aggression, and that too points to a wider pattern. For Trump is at war with the law at home as well as abroad. Indeed, in three short months, it has become an open question whether the rule of law still operates in the US...

There is no mystery to Trump. It’s all plain to see – the habits of the vandal, the autocrat, the gangster and the fool – with Ukraine as clear a guide as any. Not that that is any comfort to the people of that besieged land. They don’t want to be a cautionary tale, a demonstration case of the fecklessness and menace of Donald Trump. They want to be a free, independent nation. Their great misfortune is that the mighty country that should be their most powerful friend is now in the hands of an enemy."

How criticism of Zelensky's clothing made it to the Oval Office; BBC, March 1, 2025

Mike Wendling, BBC; How criticism of Zelensky's clothing made it to the Oval Office

"When the meeting was opened up to questions from reporters, one came from Brian Glenn, chief White House correspondent for conservative cable network Real America's Voice.

"Why don't you wear a suit?" Glenn asked. "You're at the highest level in this country's office, and you refuse to wear a suit.

"Do you own a suit?" he continued. "A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the dignity of this office."

The aggressive questioning marked the moment when the Ukrainian president – who until then seemed to be having a diplomatic, even friendly, conversation with Trump – first appeared tired and irritated.

"I will wear costume after this war will finish," Zelensky replied. (The word "suit" can be translated into Ukrainian as "kostyum".)"

The weekend the "Free World" died; The Ink, March 2, 2025

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, The Ink; ESSAY: The weekend the "Free World" died

In the Oval Office fiasco, a country revealed

"Early in the afternoon on Friday, the president and the vice president of the United States delivered a contemptuous scolding to the wartime leader of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. The country of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” and “We choose to go to the moon” and “rendezvous with destiny” had become the country of “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.” It was a shocking, abusive scene, unlike any foreign policy chroniclers could recall. By Sunday, the British prime minister had declared that “we are at a crossroads in history,” and European countries were talking about a coalition of the willing to defend Ukraine. It was the weekend the notion of the “free world” died...

Toward the end of the meeting, Trump commented that the awful scene he had participated in would make great television. Here was the triumph of the spirit of attention-seeking at any cost, the spirit in which there are no values worth defending if they do not carry the possibility of making people watch you. Everyone is an influencer now; everyone covets followers more than friends. Trump trash-talked an erstwhile American ally because he knew it would do numbers with his followers.

In recent weeks, I have wondered why the leaders of other countries have not been brave in calling out the situation in the United States, in naming this fascist threat from within. The obvious answer is American power and leverage. It can be expensive to speak truth to superpower, as Zelensky will surely be learning in coming days.

But after the meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday, I began to wonder if another reason is involved. Maybe those leaders, like much of the world, do not look at America right now and see a country being hijacked by this dangerous leader. Maybe much of the world looks at a country that, in its bones, has fundamentally changed. Has lost that other spirit. Lost the sunniness, the hopefulness, the decency, the will to sacrifice, the idealism, the confidence, the hope.

What will stop Trump? everyone is asking all day long. Maybe an actual and effective form of resistance will involve more than the thwarting of a leader. It will be a cultural project up and down American life. To resist the meanness and smallness and cruelty and cynicism and solipsism. To insist, by showing, that what he is is not who we are."

World leaders back Zelenskyy following Trump, Vance Oval Office spat; Fox News, February 28, 2025

Caitlin McFall, Fox News; World leaders back Zelenskyy following Trump, Vance Oval Office spat

"European leaders came out with sweeping support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following the explosive Oval Office meeting in which President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance gave harsh reprimands and accused him of being "disrespectful."

Several leaders took to social media to back Ukraine and to remind Washington that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the Russia-Ukraine conflict's "aggressor," not Zelenskyy."

Trump Thinks He Humiliated Zelensky. He Really Humiliated the United States; The Daily Beast, March 1, 2025

David Rothkopf, The Daily Beast; Trump Thinks He Humiliated Zelensky. He Really Humiliated the United States

"The Trump-Putin Axis came fully out of the closet today. 

The new U.S. administration has clearly embraced what might be called a “mob boss” foreign policy—because of the criminal pasts of the men who are leading it and because of the tactics they appear to favor.

In an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump and his dangerously ill-informed yes-man, JD Vance, the U.S. president pressed for a deal to squeeze mineral assets out of Ukraine in exchange for some ill-defined level of continued support for that country that could only be described as extortionate...

It was an ugly display of foreign policy crudeness, the likes of which we have never seen in the White House. It is tempting to call it inept. But it was not. It achieved precisely the goal that Putin and Trump had long sought, to produce a public break between the United States and Ukraine that would directly and meaningfully support Russia’s illegal, brutal conquest of its neighbor.

Trump and Vance, however, were rebuffed by Zelensky in important ways. When the Americans sought to perpetuate lies that have been a staple of Kremlin propaganda and Trump campaign speeches, Zelensky stood up to them. He refuted the idea that Ukraine provoked Russia’s invasion.

Trump has made it clear that he would stop U.S. support for Ukraine and that he was sympathetic to Putin, a man who has sought both to deny Ukraine’s right to exist and to wipe the country from the map.

Unsurprisingly, Zelensky was not cowed by the two-bit goons who confronted him...

It is surely one of the darkest days in the history of American foreign policy...

But for all the embarrassment we feel at our president, we should not lose sight of the hugely embarrassing and damaging performance of JD Vance. Vance, like Trump, had virtually every fact wrong. Furthermore, he was completely out of line addressing a foreign head of state as he did, especially one who is one of the genuinely great heroes of our era and who has been fighting courageously not just on behalf of his own people, but in defense of the ideals and interests of the U.S. and our long-time European allies."

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy says US businesses should pull out of Russia, calls for more aid; USA Today, March 16, 2022

Joey GarrisonCelina TeborLedyard KingJohn BaconRick RouanMatthew Brown, USA Today; Ukrainian President Zelenskyy says US businesses should pull out of Russia, calls for more aid

""Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace," he Zelenskyy said in remarks livestreamed at the U.S. Capitol. He added, “I call on you to do more."