Puce with rage, he leaned over and wagged his finger as he told the leader of a nation under assault from Russia: “You’re playing cards, you’re gambling with the lives of millions of people.” But when Donald Trump got furious with Volodymyr Zelensky, it wasn’t just business, it was personal.
As in all mafia tales, the relationship between the two leaders has been poisoned by business – specifically the business of Russia. But it would be dangerous to believe Trump’s support for Russia is just fuelled by his animus to Zelensky. It’s much worse than that.
Trump likes Putin, with whom he says he shared the experience of the “scam” of allegations that Russia interfered in his 2016 election as president. And Trump hates Zelensky for not helping him campaign against Joe Biden when he lost his second term run.
“Let me tell ya, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me – we went through a phony witch hunt when they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump ranted, as he got increasingly incoherent during the White House attack on Zelensky he launched with JD Vance, vice-president, last week.
“That was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And [Putin] had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn‘t end up in a war. And he went through it.
“He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden‘s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden‘s bedroom. It was disgusting.”
Translated – Trump says he goes way back with Putin to the days when the Kremlin was accused of getting their man, him, into the White House in 2016.
Zelensky, however, is seen by Trump as the disloyal recipient of America’s largesse for failing to open an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business deals in Ukraine in July 2019. Joe Biden was the likely Democrat candidate in the election of 2020.
Back then, Trump was impeached by congress over his alleged threat to withhold $400m in US military aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky helped with the Biden campaign and other anti-Democrat operations. Trump was cleared by the senate but the damage had been done.
So with Zelensky, it is personal. But Trump’s campaigning against Ukraine has a longer history.
In 2018, before Zelensky was elected, Trump told G7 leaders that he supported Russian’s illegal invasion of Crimea because everyone there “speaks Russian”. He went on to campaign for Russian readmission to the G7/G8 after it was subsequently expelled.
He has recently adopted almost every one of the Russian negotiating principles for peace in Ukraine, before his diplomats even met any Russians. Trump has ruled out a return of all captured Ukrainian territory, Nato support in a peacekeeping force, a Ukrainian presence in talks and future Nato membership for Ukraine.
Who knows, the US president shrugged, maybe Ukraine “will be Russian one day”. He has endorsed Putin’s desire to renew warm diplomatic relations and is openly talking about restarting business with the heavily sanctioned dictatorship in Moscow.
Trump has further suggested that he would not automatically come to the aid of Nato nations under Russian attack. And Vance has deliberately and repeatedly gone to some lengths to undermine relations with Europe and the UK with his bizarre claims that Europeans are campaigning against free speech.
Trump’s supporters have suggested that perhaps this is all part of a long-term effort to get Europe to pay more for its own defence. And above all to prise Russia away from its more natural alliance with China.
They argue this would not be a dangerous pivot, that it would be good for the West in the long run perhaps and serve as a balance to China’s dominant economic power.
The trouble is: that’s not what is happening.
It is more likely that, for reasons that remain opaque, Trump is either consciously or unconsciously doing what the Kremlin thinks is best. And driving a wedge between the US and Europe.
Putin wants to see an enfeebled West and a fractured Nato. He wants to prise America away.
He has already been delighted by Brexit, which has weakened the European Union, and by the anti-EU policies of Hungary and Slovakia, both EU members.
Now European leaders are dealing with the once unthinkable notion that America is no longer a reliable ally and that its leader sees Putin’s Russia as a model for how he would like to rule.
They look at what is happening inside America and they see a country that’s under attack from its own newly elected president. If Putin wanted to enfeeble America itself he would probably want to remove incumbent heads of the intelligence services, as Trump has, and eviscerate the military leadership, as Trump has.
Elon Musk, Trump’s enforcer – and another apologist for Putin who supports far-right anti-European Union groups in the UK and on the continent – has launched a purge of the federal bureaucracy.
He has also smashed America’s soft-power opportunities to spread Western values by shutting down USAID. Musk’s people have burrowed into the most sensitive financial details of millions of federal employees.
Democracies rely on a social contract with national administrations. When that’s hollowed out, they collapse. That’s something else Putin would like to see.
Peter Mandelson has been rightly criticised for stepping out of the UK government line, as a diplomat, by saying that Zelensky needs to repair his relationship with Trump. He has also missed the point of what happened in the White House.
It may have appeared to be a clash between two men. It was not. It was a clash of civilisations – a shift of the US into the Russian sphere. It wasn’t just personal, it was strategic.
