This article was originally published in the April 2025 print edition of Byline Times
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Faultlines
As an exercise in politics as spectacle; a projection of humiliation as strength, Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office served its likely objectives.
Played out before the world’s media in real time, the Ukrainian President was rounded on by both men, accusing him of not being grateful for America’s support during Russia’s ongoing invasion and of not showing them enough “respect”.
It had all the Trumpian trimmings: psychological punches thrown in the throes of hypermasculinity; the performative cruelty that fuels the fire of the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement.
“This is going to be great television,” Trump said as it ended. The President promised his voters – his victims of a broken system – that there would be no ‘business as usual’ when he returned. But many still found the confrontation with Zelensky shocking.
It was the end of the United States as a global defender of democracy and freedom. ‘America First’ was aggression made explicit, not passive retreat.
And yet, the final 10 minutes of heated exchanges – which made headlines around the world – were inevitable, given the preceding 39 minutes of what had unfolded.
The meeting in the Oval Office that day exposed the clash of two opposing and incompatible political mindsets, philosophies, psychologies, and aims.
The collision of these faultlines – Zelensky’s war-torn realities and his warnings of complexity; Trump’s business-like brutishness and populist simplicities – led to the eruption that the world should have been waiting for.
The Art of the Deal
Long before Donald Trump became President, he was in the homes of millions of Americans as the host of the business reality TV show The Apprentice.
A 2024 film of the same name, starring Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, ends with Trump attributing to himself three ‘rules’ of business – told to him by his mentor Roy Cohn – in his autobiography, The Art of the Deal.
The “deal” is what Trump was looking for in the Oval Office with Zelensky – a proportion of Ukraine’s mineral deposits in exchange for long-term US financial investment in the country’s reconstruction.
Trump had been a “businessman” his whole life, he kept telling the assembled reporters. This transactional approach also drove his “hope I’ll be known and recognised as a peacemaker”.
For Zelensky, there can be no peace without security guarantees.
Having led his country in a brave and much commended defence since Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the man carries around within him direct, personal, first-hand, experience of the blood being shed.
While agreeing with Trump that this had to stop, he repeatedly questioned how the President’s “deal” alone would be able to enforce a ceasefire with the “terrorist and killer” Vladimir Putin, who he said had already broken previous obligations of the same kind 25 times.
Putin respects me, I don’t think he’ll break an agreement I broker, Trump replied, the Godfather. Then again, anything could happen, he acknowledged – including a bomb falling on the heads of those in the Oval Office that moment.
Zelensky appeared aghast and baffled at just how to navigate the circus around him. When the former comedian who played a president-turned-President was asked 19 minutes into the meeting by a reporter why he wasn’t wearing a suit, he couldn’t mask his underlying contempt.
For many of Trump’s supporters, his approach to the Ukraine war will be another example of his transactional pragmatism as a type of pseudo-realism.
A year before he was re-elected, nearly every taxi driver I met in New York said they would be voting for him – not because they approved of his style, but because he was a businessman who knew how to ‘get things done’.
Trump’s voters don’t see why American money should be funding a war in Europe when they are struggling with their lives at home.
Zelensky is not unaware of this. He agreed throughout the meeting on 28 February that hopefully the war could now end with Trump involved. But, for him, the “deal” was not so simple.
When Trump told him “you don’t have the cards”, Zelensky quietly replied: “I am not playing cards.”
Later, when he told the Ukrainian President that he was “gambling with world war three and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to this country”, Zelensky responded that he had always thanked the American people for their support but that he could not engage in “diplomacy” with a man who had invaded his country.
Zelensky injected doses of reality where he could.
When Trump said he didn’t want to talk about Odesa but wanted to focus on the minerals deal (which Zelensky didn’t end up signing), the President said that “a lot of cities have been destroyed” in Ukraine and that there are “a lot of cities that are not recognisable, there’s not a building standing”.
Zelensky corrected him: “Mr President, you have to come and to look. No, no, no. We have very good cities. Yes, a lot of things have been destroyed, but mostly our cities are alive, and people work, and children go to school. Sometimes it’s very difficult. Closer to the frontline, children have to go to underground schools. But we live. Ukraine is fighting and Ukraine lives. This is very important. And maybe Putin is sharing disinformation, that he has destroyed us.”
Trump either didn’t know or understand this; had bought into Putin’s disinformation as Zelensky suggested; or simpl