Trump's mistake: everyone hates Putin

The Oval Office ambush backfired. Trump misplayed his cards by being too obviously pro-Putin. The result is the majority of the world rallying around Zelenskyy and Ukraine all over again.

Donald Trump is really, really bad at diplomacy.

There may not be a skill in governance for which he is more poorly suited: it requires nuance (or in more negative contexts, subterfuge), mutual understanding, careful and methodical use of language, and patient persistence, with an ability and willingness to stay focused and to play the long game over time. Trump states everything in stark terms of my-way-or-the-highway, he is relentlessly selfish and sociopathic in his inability to grasp others’ points of view, he blurts out whatever he’s thinking, and he loses focus quickly and moves on to the next shiny object.

To put it differently, diplomacy is partly chess and partly poker, and despite Trump’s slap at Zelenskyy about whether Ukraine has any “cards,” Trump is likely hilariously atrocious at both games — giving away his position, failing to keep his thoughts or emotions hidden, and utterly lacking in the patience to think strategically.

So at Friday’s meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump was all too obvious in his support for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin — and this is already backfiring on Trump.

The problem for Trump is that Vladimir Putin is roundly despised by much of the rest of the world — and even by most Republicans in the US. A new Wall Street Journal poll found that 83% of Republicans disapprove of Putin; in other words, they hate Putin as much as they hate most Democrats. Those numbers are in line with national polling in Europe, where 82-98% of those polled have negative views of Putin. Even 76-77% of Hungarians — ruled by a pro-Putin kleptocratic dictator, Viktor Orban — have a negative view of Putin and Russia.

Trump’s apparent objective right now is to broker an end to the war on terms favorable to Russia, allowing Putin to save face — but in order to do so, he at least needed to appear like he was not doing Putin’s bidding.

He failed. Miserably. Plus he doubled down on the failure by having JD Vance pile on, exacerbating the bad optics of attacking Zelenskyy, and this came against the backdrop of Trump calling Zelenskyy a dictator (garnering rebukes even from the right) and then denying that he did so (because he needed to backtrack).

As a result he reignited the world’s love affair with Zelenskyy and Ukraine — and to cast the deepest shadows of doubt on the reliability of America’s security promises to its allies, not only in Europe but globally.

It wasn’t a peace talk. It was a planned attack.

Before the past few weeks, Ukraine had mostly fallen out of the headlines; it was rare to see anything about the war trending on social media for well over a year. Polls in the US and Europe had shown declining confidence in Ukraine and Zelenskyy. There was thus an opening for Trump to drive a wedge between Zelenskyy and a sense of exhaustion about the war — to state, in effect, that he supports Ukraine but also wants to see peace (and the devil, of course, would be in the details, with Ukraine being forced to give up territory and other concessions).

Instead, by being so obviously pro-Putin (and by backing someone who’s so deeply unpopular), Trump has lost his position of being anything resembling an honest broker — and suddenly Ukraine is back in the headlines, trending online, and Zelenskyy is being hailed as a hero for zealously defending his people and for standing up to Trump.

Now, just as Europe unified around its opposition to Putin three years ago, it is now unifying even more around its opposition to Putin and Trump. The Russian invasion of Ukraine led to Sweden and Finland finally dropping their historical neutrality and joining NATO. Trump’s attack on Zelenskyy has already led to NATO having an emergency meeting over the weekend — without America — on defending Ukraine and Europe as a whole from the Russian threat.

Trump not only showed his cards to everyone, he effectively gave Zelenskyy a bunch of new cards and a giant pile of chips — giving him a fresh boost, right when he could have been nudged to leave the table and call it a night.

Now, does this necessarily mean that Europe will give Zelenskyy the support he needs to continue a longer war? No: this remains to be seen. Does this necessarily mean that America will somehow find a way to support Ukraine in spite of Trump? No: this remains an uphill battle, but the more Trump embraces Putin, the more room he risks a backlash from anti-Putin Republicans who need to cater to their anti-Putin constituencies. Does this necessarily mean that Trump’s attempt to broker a peace is now at an end? No: if there is a vacuum of leadership from Europe, Trump will shove his way back to being the center of attention, just as he literally shoves other world leaders out of the way at conferences, especially when they’re in between him and a camera.

Regardless of what happens next, though, one thing is very much certain. For all his talk about cards, it was Trump who overplayed his hand on Friday.