There was no mistake about yesterday’s reality-TV spectacle of Volodymyr Zelensky being berated by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.
Trump may or may not be the world’s first reality-TV president, but he is certainly the world’s first reality-TV emperor. He would like the world to see him holding court as world leaders come to him like the three kings to Jesus.
Vance was clearly prepared to be his attack dog (his pro-Putin sympathies are known and perhaps even better understood than Trump’s). The MAGA-spiked press corps — like the Real America’s Voice correspondent (Brian Glenn, partner of Marjorie Taylor Greene) who attacked Zelensky for not wearing a suit — and the likelihood that Zelensky was treated this way all day preceding this press appearance, can all be considered part of the set-up for this stage. By failing to keep his cool, Zelensky fell into their trap. But the situation was calculated to make him do that.
But Zelensky also succeeded in demonstrating that truth need not so easily cave in to imperial niceties. That will go down better with many Ukrainians (57% of whom trust him, according to last week’s data), and with others around the world who care about democracy, liberty, and the other values the US has pretended to represent to the world, that Ukrainians today actually die for, and that Europeans are being called to defend. By the same token, caving into Trump’s attempted extortion of Ukraine’s “raw earth,” as he kept calling it, without any security guarantees, would likely not have served Zelensky well.
Peace, in this case, will not be found through the “deal” Trump wants, which seems calculated to give Putin everything he wants, or close to it, and to give the US something “back” for the money it’s spent (which is far less than Trump claims), as if that will magically lead to Russia abstaining from chewing off more of Ukraine in the future, and of regaining the political-economic and informational influence it had over Ukrainians until 2014.
There’s a case to be made that someone must lead the “free world,” now that Trump has dislodged any idea that there even is such a world. (It’s a problematic idea, to be sure, but not entirely lacking in substance.) From that perspective, Zelensky did pretty well in reminding leaders that emperors do not deserve everything they ask for.
It’s also important, in this context, to remind people that there’s a neo-imperial vision at play here — one in which Trump would like to get “his” North America, from Panama to Greenland and the Arctic, along with pieces elsewhere (the Gaza strip, Ukraine), while allowing his global peers (Putin and Xi) to rule their own spheres of influence through unchecked power.
What’s at stake, in other words, is the fledgling world order of sovereign nations (at least some of which are democratic), international agreements (on topics from climate change to nuclear proliferation), and the rule of something resembling law.
