"You don’t have the cards right now" – "I'm not playing cards Mr President" – "Oh you're playing cards, you're gambling with the lives of millions of people"

Thoughts on the most amazing bilateral meeting and press conference of all time.

tfw you have no cards.

Since 2022, the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has been running about the globe in his weird focus-grouped jumpers and combat boots, lecturing all of our parliaments on the unity and mutual interests of Europe, the goodness of democracy, the genocidal evils of Vladimir Putin and the importance of ever more weapons deliveries to his country’s armed forces. In the process, he has become one of the more obnoxious political phenomena in recent memory, and I hope I would be able to see this even if I were firmly convinced that German interests aligned perfectly with Ukrainian interests and that we should do nothing but give the AFU all of our tanks and all of our Taurus missiles and possibly even all of our soldiers to defend our shiny wonderful and deeply liberal European democracy, where we are so free that riot police will bash your head in for protesting Covid restrictions and if you call the wrong cabinet minister a moron the speech crimes battalion will raid your house.

Here in Europe, our political leaders have treated the shouting, remonstrating Zelensky with nothing but egregious reverence, and the man has grown accustomed to his noxious political celebrity. Nothing else can explain the amazing press conference Zelensky and Trump held yesterday, ahead of afternoon plans to sign an agreement concerning Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals. We got to witness nothing less than the near-total meltdown of American and Ukrainian relations, live and in colour. Historians of the Ukraine war will be writing about this press conference for years and decades to come.

The meeting almost didn’t happen at all. Zelensky has been publicly irritated that Trump reversed the American policy of isolating Russia, after the American president opened talks with Vladimir Putin to end the war. Two weeks ago, Trump suggested that Ukraine was at fault for the hostilities, Zelensky said Trump was “living in a [Russian] disinformation space,” and Trump said Zelensky was “a dictator without elections.” Trump’s administration initially planned to cancel Zelensky’s visit to Washington this week, but French President Emmanuel Macron persuaded the Americans to go ahead with it. Imagine how much the man regrets that now. After receiving his verbal beat-down in the Oval Office, Zelensky and the rest of the Ukrainian delegation decamped to the Roosevelt Room, while Trump and his advisers decided that the President of Ukraine “was in no position to negotiate.” White House officials told them to leave before they could even eat lunch.

Foreign relations are typically pounded out in back rooms, out of sight, and that was also the intent here. Somewhere in the midst of the journalists’ questions and Trump’s banter, however, yesterday’s event ceased being a press conference and became at first a subtle unacknowledged negotiation and then a hostile disagreement – one which Zelensky got the worst of.

Only the final four minutes of the Trump-Zelensky meeting are really making the rounds, but the whole encounter is worth studying, because a sensitive reading shows what went wrong – in particular what annoyed our American heads of state, and how Zelensky screwed up so badly. I hope you’ll join me in picking through this debacle in all of its details, from the seemingly mundane opening statements all the way through to the end. We’ve never seen anything like this before.