Add Murray State University historian Brian Clardy’s name to the lengthy list of politicians, journalists, scholars and others denouncing President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance for publicly threatening and berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Given Trump’s temperament, given his sophomoric behavior and his lack of diplomatic common sense, I was not surprised he did it,” Clardy said. “But I was shocked at the ferocity with which he and the vice president double-teamed President Zelenskyy. It made us look like imbecilic bullies. It embarrassed the country.”
Yet the GOP and its allies in the rightwing media have almost unanimously rallied to Trump and Vance. “I have never been more proud of the president,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “I was very proud of JD Vance standing up for our country.”
Democrats saw the dustup differently. “Trump and Vance are doing Putin’s dirty work,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “Senate Democrats will never stop fighting for freedom and democracy.”
According to a CBS News-YouGov poll taken after the confrontation, “only 4 percent of Americans back Russia in the ongoing conflict with Ukraine, as questions swirl over where Donald Trump stands on the issue,” wrote The Independent’s New York-based Mike Bedigan. The survey revealed “that a slim majority (52 percent) backed Ukraine, though a surprising 44 percent said they supported ‘neither’ side.”
But most traditional media analysis and opinion also supports Ukraine’s president.
Trump’s “verbal assault on Mr. Zelensky was a stunning display of anger and resentment toward the leader of a country that has been invaded by a larger power intent on eliminating it as an independent state,” wrote Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. “No other president in memory has lashed out at a visiting foreign leader in the Oval Office on camera in such a vituperative way, not even at an adversary of the United States, much less a putative ally.”
Times columnist Maureen Dowd didn’t mince words: “It was a sickening spectacle: the man who tried to upend democracy bullying the man who is fighting for democracy. … Even though we should be used to it by now, it was still shocking to see Trump parrot the view of Vladimir Putin, a murderous tyrant who wants to swallow Ukraine in a fit of nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Trump insisted they were fellow victims.”
Her column was headlined “Trump Is Rootin’ for Putin.”
Like Dowd, Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce seldom pulls punches. He wrote that Trump “ embarrassed himself, the nation, and every thinking human being on earth. He — and his vice president — berated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in front of the press and public.”
Pierce praised Zelenskyy for giving “it right back to [Trump] ... thank God, making it clear that he wouldn’t be bullied into accepting a ‘deal’ produced by negotiations in which he had not been invited to participate.”
Trump, according to Pierce, “reacted like an angry child, repeatedly calling the Ukrainian president an ingrate, relitigating the whole mock ‘scandal’ regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma, apologizing to Vladimir Putin for the mean things that people like ‘Shifty Schiff’ said about him during Impeachment 1, and, eventually, lapsing completely into angry incoherence while Zelenskyy looked to be on the edge of decking him right there on the carpet. Zelenskyy left town without signing the mineral-rights deal that the president had sought so enthusiastically.”
After Trump and Vance browbeat and belittled Zelenskyy, administration officials asked him to leave. Clardy is glad he refused to be strongarmed. “There was no way Zelenskyy could have stayed and signed that rare earth minerals deal – not for him, not for the people of Ukraine and certainly not for the Ukrainians who have died defending their county.”
Clardy said nobody benefited from the bullying of Zelenskyy “except Vladimir Putin. I have never seen an American president carry water like this for a Russian leader. Every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter who has died is spinning in his grave, Democrats and Republicans.”
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