Why has Trump bad-mouthed Zelensky to such a degree?
Six possible explanations
Donald Trump’s claims that Ukraine started the war with Russia and that its president is a dictator are so transparently dishonest that some of his critics are reviving the theory that Vladimir Putin, whom Trump refuses to call a dictator, “has something” on the U.S. president.
In a bizarre way, this may be among the more “innocent” explanations for Trump’s lies. If Putin really did have something on Trump, then I could understand Trump spouting ridiculous Russian propaganda. Self-preservation, though not an honorable motive, is arguably less dishonorable than some of the ones I’ll discuss below.
However, I very much doubt that Trump is behaving as he is because Putin has something on him. Robert Mueller spent millions of dollars trying to establish a nefarious connection between Putin and Trump. He came up empty.
What, moreover, could Putin have on Trump that would harm him significantly? Trump has survived and flourished after so many scandals that it might take convincing evidence that he’s on the Kremlin’s payroll to move the needle. And, as noted, Mueller went looking for this kind of evidence but didn’t find it.
What follows is a long list of more plausible explanations for Trump’s lies about Ukraine and its president. Some are mutually exclusive, but most can be at play together.
The most innocent explanation of all is that Trump is “trolling” Zelensky in order to obtain a peace agreement that will be beneficial, or at least not unduly harmful, to Ukraine. Victor Davis Hanson makes this case.
But mediators typically bring about deals by being “honest brokers.” Trump is being a dishonest broker.
Hanson never satisfactorily explains how Trump’s lies will promote a deal that’s acceptable under the circumstances — one in which Ukraine gives up territory in exchange for guarantees of future security. For this deal to make sense for Ukraine, Zelensky needs to believe that Putin won’t, in the not-too-distant future, start another war. Trump’s denial that Putin started the last one will likely convince Zelensky (and should) that, if/when Putin starts another one, Trump will again blame Ukraine and refuse to help the Ukrainians.
Hanson speculates that Trump is trying to get Zelensky’s attention. But he doesn’t explain why Trump needs to attack Zelensky to achieve this. Trump has all the leverage here because our aid is vital to Ukraine’s war effort. This reality alone should be sufficient to get Zelensky’s full attention. There’s no need to insult Ukraine, thereby creating doubt that the U.S. can be trusted to prevent subsequent aggression by Putin.
A second explanation is that by demonizing Ukraine and Zelensky, Trump lays the groundwork for selling out Ukraine. In this account, Trump doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine (JD Vance’s stated position). He just wants a deal that halts the war because that’s what he promised during the campaign. Casting Ukraine and Zelensky as the villains will make it easier for the American public to swallow a bad deal and the future destruction (if not obliteration) Ukraine might well experience.
A third explanation, fully consistent with the second, is that Trump hates Zelensky because of his tangential involvement in the first Trump impeachment. What Trump said to the Ukrainian president in that famous phone call became the basis for the meritless impeachment.
Zelensky, of course, had nothing to do with the impeachment. It wasn’t his fault that Trump said things his adversaries could use against him and that his adversaries overreached by casting a bad phone call as grounds for impeachment.
But facts like these never matter to Trump. Like King Lear, his rage often has only a loose connection to reality.
Recently, for example, Trump fired the head of the National Archives and Records Administration even though (1) she played no role in the classified documents case against him (it was her predecessor who did) and (2) she stood up to Joe Biden when he tried to pressure her into making a public statement of support for the Equal Rights Amendment as part of the Constitution.
When Trump thinks of his first impeachment, he thinks of Zelensky. That association is probably enough to induce hatred, and that hatred might well explain Trump’s attacks on Zelensky and his pro-Russia stance.
A fourth explanation is that Trump really likes and admires Putin. While not the only possible explanation for why Trump won’t criticize the Russian dictator and why he tilts so strongly in his favor, it’s quite a plausible one.
Why might Trump really like and admire Putin? Probably because he likes and admires strong leaders, which is how Trump fancies himself. Even if there had never been an impeachment based on his phone conversation with Zelensky, it’s easy to believe that, as between the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, Trump would prefer the autocratic Putin to his less formidable seeming counterpart.
A fifth explanation is that Trump thinks brokering a peace deal favorable to Putin will induce the Russian dictator to help the U.S. on other fronts — that it will open new vistas of superpower cooperation. Perhaps Trump wants to get closer to Putin in order to better counter China. Or maybe he wants economic favors from Russia.
I hope Trump isn’t thinking this way because Putin can’t be trusted as a partner of America, even an America led by Trump. But it’s quite possible that Trump sees Ukraine as a pawn in a global chess match.
Yet another explanation, and the last I’ll suggest, is one being touted by certain leftists like Susan Glasser. They believe that Trump is reviving a sphere of influence approach to international relations.
In this account, Canada, Panama, and Greenland should be part of America’s sphere of influence, while Ukraine (and probably not just Ukraine) are rightfully part of Russia’s. If we’re going to assert dominance in our sphere of influence, why try to stop Russia from asserting dominance in its?
I hope Trump isn’t viewing things this way, and not just, or even primarily, for Ukraine’s sake. Any sphere of influence analysis would certainly place Taiwan in China’s.
Selling Ukraine down the river for any reason would send bad signals to China. Selling it out under a sphere of influence theory would be even worse.
Of the six possible explanations for Trump’s behavior, I lean towards the second (Trump wants to turn public opinion against Ukraine), the third (he hates Zelensky), and the fourth (he really likes Putin, but I don’t fully discount any of the others.
There are explanations, yes, but there are no excuses. "Trolling" is something done by airheads with too much time on their hands, not, one would hope, by a President of the United States.
I believe the last analysis (Susan Glassner's) is correct. Ukraine IS a pawn in a global power contest, spheres of influence around the three global superpowers DO exist, and Taiwan IS in China's sphere of influence.
We may not like it, but those are facts, dictated by geography and circumstance.
You cannot change geography, but you can mitigate spheres of influence and raise the cost of aggression.
Anyone who can read a map can understand why Trump (and those around him) view consolidating US control of waters and airspace from Panama to the arctic circle (Greenland) could be strategically game-changing. Yet not a peep from the foreign policy experts in Washington.
Russia and China have for years been extending their dominion to the arctic for the same strategic reasons, while the US has done very little to counter their presence there.
China has extended its military forward-basing into the South China Sea, where it can not only launch planes and ships, but also exert control over critical shipping lanes used in inter-continental trade, and through their Belt-and-Road initiative they have established functional naval bases in South and Central America and have positioned themselves to control both ends of the Panama Canal.
Is it that hard to see what's going on here?
This is not about whether or not Trump "likes" Putin; this is not junior high school. This is a geopolitical negotiation, not about who gets Donbas. As Kissinger used to day, geopolitics is a rough game; it has nothing to do with justice, fairness, right and wrong. It is a contest of positioning, containment and dominance - pure power struggle. It is the mafia, not the Senate.
And since when do you gain the edge in a negotiation by calling your interlocutor nasty names? That was Joe Biden's approach; he didn't even talk to Putin on the phone for three years. We get it: Putin is a rat bastard. But so are Xi, Kim Jong Il, Maduro and others. Yet they exist.
It is a common tactic in finance negotiations to reduce the number of players at the table to two. The players who bring money are the ones who get to call the shots. In this case, Zellenskyy, the unelected President of a country that cannot defend its borders without massive foreign aid, doesn't get to be a player. Trump is merely making that clear.
Trump took the same approach in the Abraham Accords, for which he gets little credit. While the experts in Washington insist that no progress is possible in the middle east without a "two-state solution," Trump pushed the noisy and useless Hamas and Palestinian Authority to the sidelines and brought the monied players to the table to make a deal against a common enemy, Iran.
What does each party in this conflict need to stop a war that is costing all of them in business terms? Putin needs a way to save face if he signs a deal, Zellenskyy needs a way to stay out of exile or Russian jail and ensure there remains a sovereign Ukrain and the US needs to extract itself from an unnecessary and expensive war with a nuclear power to focus its resources on a much more serious threat in the Pacific and improve its strategic position against future aggression.
It is true that Putin is not a reliable treaty partner. Neither is the CCP, but that hasn't stopped the US from doing business with them. We needn't blunder into the same mistakes we made with China but we do need to accept the fact that a hostile Russia exists, will exist, has its own security interests and needs to be effectively contained. Ukraine is not the key to this; leverage over the Russian economy, its relationship with China and its ability to launch hypersonic missiles into the US is.
Lots of Russian and Ukrainian blood has been shed over this war for three years. One of Trump's objectives is that not one drop of American blood should be shed over Ukraine, and I agree with that.