Zelenskyy Forgot The First Rule Of Dealing With Trump

When President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was first elected in 2019, he proved to be a quick study on how to try to win over his American counterpart.

In one of his first conversations with President Donald Trump — yes, the “perfect phone call” that would later trigger impeachment proceedings — Zelenskyy claimed he wanted to “drain the swamp” in Ukraine and praised Trump for showing him how.

“You are a great teacher for us in that,” he said.

Fast forward almost six years — to a pivotal moment for his war-torn country’s future — Zelenskyy seems to have forgotten the first rule in dealing with Trump: Flattery is the coin of the realm — and perceived insults, especially in public, will quickly get you kicked to the curb.

So it went with Friday’s shocking Oval Office meeting, where Zelenskyy blundered into an on-camera debate with Vice President JD Vance before igniting Trump’s ire by disagreeing with him (or, as Trump allies saw it, lecturing him).

To state the obvious, Zelenskyy is a completely different man in a completely different situation than he was in 2019. Russia has invaded his country, massacred his people, kidnapped Ukrainian children and turned city after city into rubble. Nothing he said in the Oval Office Friday was false — and he has every right and reason to remind the world Ukraine was the victim of Russian aggression, not the cause of it.

To state what’s also obvious, Trump hasn’t changed a bit. Already suspicious of Ukraine before Zelenskyy was even elected, he now associates the country and its leader with his domestic political enemies, and he has mostly, if not completely, pulled the Republican Party behind him.

So if Zelenskyy wants to the U.S. to “stay with us, not with Russians,” as he put it in his Fox News interview after the disastrous Oval Office meeting Friday, he’s going to have to come to terms with the new reality of Washington: America’s posture toward Ukraine has drastically shifted under Trump and Vance, and even Zelenskyy’s longtime supporters say the quicker he realizes that, the better it will be for his country.

The immediate question, however, is whether he can overcome the anger of Trump and other White House officials over what happened Friday.

“I just don't know what … Zelenskyy can do to mend the fences,” one White House official told me late Friday night. “Shaking his head, rolling his eyes? He's trying to help you and he’s getting snide remarks in his own house?”

Another official, who like the others was granted anonymity to candidly describe the reaction inside the administration, said “everyone in the building — from the president on down — felt completely disrespected.”

“Today reflected many, many hours of many, many people's lives in an effort to build a partnership. … Instead, look at where he is: Even fucking Lindsey Graham is talking about how fucked up he was,” the official added, referring to the hawkish South Carolina senator who criticized Zelenskyy immediately after the Oval Office blowup.

Some Trump critics have suggested without evidence that the Oval Office blowup was a premeditated trap laid by Trump and Vance intended to sink the U.S.-Ukraine alliance once and for all. That accusation is infuriating White House aides who worked on the arrangements for Friday’s meeting and scrambled to make sense of what had happened afterward.

“I don't think anyone expected him to have the balls to show up and try to pick a fight with the toughest and biggest personality in world politics in public,” said a third White House official. “So I don't think anyone perceived such a strategic misstep for a country that's on the brink of annihilation.”

Insiders who know Trump well say the very idea he had planned a public ritual of humiliation for Zelenskyy, while not out of character for the president, belies an even more basic truth: Trump loves cutting deals — especially ones the rest of the world deem impossible.

The White House officials I spoke with Friday said Trump was eager to move forward with the mining-rights deal his team had negotiated with the Ukrainians. Some administration officials had suggested earlier in the week that the two leaders sign the deal before the meeting and use Zelenskyy’s Oval Office visit as a victory lap. But Trump wanted to make a spectacle of signing documents together live on camera, one White House official told me.

Was that expecting too much from Zelenskyy — to sit and smile while signing away a portion of his nation’s mineral wealth without getting security guarantees in return?

It’s easy to see why the Ukrainian leader would come in with a chip on his shoulder. In the span of a few months, his country’s greatest financial and military supporter has gone soft, with its new leader pushing him toward a peace deal while publicly floating terms favorable to Russian President Vladimir Putin — including reneging on promises of NATO membership.

Trump administration officials, on the other hand, feel like they’ve been more than generous given the public sniping between the two leaders over the past weeks. Zelenskyy infuriated Trump last week with his public suggestion he was swallowing Putin’s disinformation — a response to Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine started the war — but two officials said the administration never demanded a public apology before allowing the mineral talks to proceed.

And they note, Trump himself had toned things down. He backed away from his suggestion that Zelenskyy was a “dictator” during his meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer the day before. And during the meeting Friday, neither Trump nor Vance brought up Zelenskyy’s recent slights or their long history of reservations about his country.

That is, until Vance suggested that diplomacy was the right way to handle Putin — and Zelenskyy questioned what kind of “diplomacy” he meant given that the Russian president has broken such deals in the past — an inquiry Vance clearly saw as a provocation.

“I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country,” Vance told Zelenskyy, adding, “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”

The meeting went off the rails even after Zelenskyy was advised to stick to the script during a private gathering with senators on Friday morning shortly before he headed to the White House.

“Everyone was giving him the same advice, which was get the deal done, don't play games and be very appreciative of everything that Trump and the administration have done,” said a person familiar with Zelenskyy’s conversations with GOP senators. “Lead with, ‘Thank you for everything that you've done,’ and get the deal done.”

Now those pro-Zelenskyy lawmakers are frantically trying to figure out how to put the pieces back together. White House officials believe that Graham, who rode with Trump on Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago Friday night, will play a central role in finding out if an agreement is salvageable.

Graham himself told reporters Friday, “I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelenskyy again” and that the Ukrainian president “either needs to resign and send somebody over that we can do business with or he needs to change."

Zelenskyy’s decision to sidestep an opportunity to apologize in his Fox News interview didn’t help. But two senior White House officials told me that Trump meant it when he said Zelenskyy “can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

“He still wants a deal,” one said.