Ukraine Is Being Punished Because Zelenskyy Did Not Buy Trump's Superpowers
The White House wanted the Ukrainian president to sell out his country to appease Putin
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plaintive plea to Donald Trump after the disastrous Friday press conference did not prevent Trump from cutting off aid to Ukraine last night. Immediately after being thrown out of the White House, Zelenskyy profusely thanked Trump and posted on X:
Still, Trump announced a temporary suspension of all military help to Ukraine until it had demonstrated a good-faith commitment to peace negotiations with Russia. Given that Zelenskyy, in fact, wanted to be at the table in Riyadh when America held talks with Russia and Saudi Arabia to settle his country’s fate and has expressed a willingness to make territorial concessions if the West gave firm security guarantees, it is clear that this demand is less about negotiating with Russia and more about groveling before Trump.
This is more proof, if any was needed, that Trump is a narcissistic authoritarian who cares about nothing but his ego—and good TV (which he emphasized in so many words at the end of the presser). Zelenskyy, by contrast, is a true patriot and a classical liberal hero, as The UnPopulist’s Editor-at-Large Tom Shull has previously observed.
To say that the treatment that Zelenskyy received at the hands of Trump, his sycophantic foreign policy team of JD Vance and Marco Rubio, and Trump’s lapdogs in the American press was an abomination is an understatement. It will go down as the most shameful episode in the annals of U.S. diplomacy with no close second. There is an Urdu word that kept popping in my head as I watched the nauseating performance, especially by Vance: badtameez. Vance’s Indian wife can explain the word to him but, roughly, it means a person who is rude, indecent, mannerless, and uncouth.
A Misfit in Fatigues
MAGA commentators have been berating Zelenskyy for not dressing properly for the event and fact-checking Trump on national TV.
Trump teed up the feeding frenzy himself about Zelenskyy’s attire when he greeted him by tsking, “How are you? You’re all dressed up today.” Brian Glenn, a reporter with the Trump-boosting Real America’s Voice cable network, who is also Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend, picked up on this during the presser and scolded Zelenskyy, “You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit.” As Vance chuckled approvingly at this insolence, Glenn continued, “Do you own a suit?”
Setting aside the indecency of the lackey of an administration that holds nothing sacred—violates every norm at will—insisting on a dress code, Zelenskyy is not the first leader to face obnoxious questioning by sneering Western journos about his attire. Mahatma Gandhi faced Glenn-style queries when he visited seats of Western power wrapped in his simple, hand-spun, cotton yarn to press his case for India’s independence from the British. He was lampooned as the naked fakir. In one famous exchange with a British journalist who confronted him for not wearing more clothes to have tea with the king at Buckingham Palace, Gandhi quipped: “The king had enough on for both of us.”
Gandhi’s clothing was meant to express solidarity with his fellow Indians struggling under Britain’s exploitative, apartheid rule that turned them into second-class citizens on their own land. Ukrainians face a future every bit as grim—if not grimmer—if Russia reannexes their country.
After all, in the century before Ukraine broke free in 1991, as Nataliya Melnyk, The UnPopulist’s contributor from Ukraine, has noted, Russia had subjected her country to three Great Famines, forced population transfers in an ethnic-cleansing effort, draconian crackdowns on Ukrainian writers to wipe out her country’s language and culture, and more. Ukrainians understand this, which is why they are fighting Putin so hard. And Zelenskyy’s t-shirt and fatigues—his military uniform—are a gesture of camaraderie with Ukrainian soldiers who are facing Russian bullets so that their fellow Ukrainians don’t have to face extinction, and meant to draw a contrast with the butcher of Moscow who dons expensive suits while dispatching his soldiers, under-clothed and under-equipped, to die on the battlefield for a monstrous cause.
The Sin of Setting the Record Straight
It wasn’t just MAGA yahoos like Glenn who piled on to Zelenskyy. Smart-set conservatives like The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, a reliably pro-Trump voice who works at the otherwise sensible American Enterprise Institute, denounced Zelenskyy for engaging in an “unprecedented war of words” with Trump and demanded to know, “Why on earth did Zelenskyy choose to fact-check Trump in front of the entire world?”
Well, I can think of at least one obvious reason, namely, that Trump was presenting him with a deadly fait accompli by asking him to accept a ceasefire without any security guarantees. If Zelenskyy had pretended to go along with this deal before the TV cameras only to back out behind closed doors, Trump would have accused him of duplicity.
A desperate Zelenskyy therefore tried to convince Trump that a diplomatic path that didn’t deal with both the cessation of hostilities and workable security guarantees simultaneously would not be worth the paper it was signed on. Putin has a long history of signing such ceasefires only to violate them shortly afterwards. Zelenskyy had to bring this up—so he started recounting all the previous agreements Russia had signed and broken between 2014 and 2022.
Trump’s response was to tell one lie after another about the extent of U.S. aid to Ukraine and claim that Zelenskyy’s worries were unwarranted this time because, he, Trump, was the one doing the “deal making,” not his weakling predecessors.
So, in essence, Zelenskyy’s sin was that he did not believe in Trump’s magical superpowers to keep a thug like Putin in line. Could Zelenskyy have kept a cooler head and not pressed his case too hard? Perhaps. But the fact is that he was treading on a densely packed, easily triggered minefield of Trump’s ego and was bound to set off some explosion. And of course it was Trump who made the unusual decision to bring the press in before the issues had been worked out.
Zelenskyy is by no means perfect—and this press conference showed that he is raw and unpracticed in the art of diplomatic fawning—but unlike our own leader, he is a humble man who avoids self-glorification.
Had it not been for Zelenskyy’s “courage, fair-mindedness, and a resolution to serve his people, forgoing the abuses of populism,” as Shull put it, the morale of the Ukrainian people might have waned as they fought this existential battle. These are all quintessential classical liberal virtues. And if liberal democracy survives in the world, it will be in some part due to Zelenskyy’s willingness to fight for his own fledgling one against the depredations of a totalitarian regime—not America’s current administration whose warped morality causes it to embrace murderous enemies while spurning friends in their gravest hour of need. Zelenskyy is a better representative of the values that America stands for than America itself under its current regime.
God help Ukraine—but also America. Ukraine will need it for its physical survival. America, for its moral.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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There was no deal on the table and Trump did not have any kind of a strategy or plan for the encounter other than simple domination. He wanted Zelenskyy to grovel before him and agree to everything, but he couldn't care less about what the everything might be. The point of the exercise was domination and humiliation, pure and total.
Thank you for this excellent article. I agree President Zelens’kyi shows more courage , compassion and devotion to democracy than those two spineless and cowardly thugs Vance and Trump and their enabling sycophants who in an attempt to ridicule President Zelenskyy disgraced themselves and the USA. And Mr. Glenn? Come on what more needs to be said: he is Marjorie Taylor Green’s. Boyfriend