By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 3, 2025 ~
Donald Trump’s gangster diplomacy and anger management issues went viral on the front page of newspapers around the globe on Saturday, following his verbal assault on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, in the Oval Office on Friday. Those headlines were then parsed and debated on Sunday’s TV news programs here in the U.S. and by U.S. based newspaper columnists.
Margaret Brennan of the CBS News program, Face the Nation, reported on her program on Sunday morning that “Our social media producers tell us that, as of this morning, we have had more than 100 million views on posts related to the meeting across our CBS News social media platforms.”
The reason for the unprecedented interest is because no other U.S. President in history has conducted such thug “diplomacy” with a foreign ally by screaming at him in the Oval Office in front of television cameras. Trump, turning red in the face, yelled at Zelensky that he had no cards to play and wasn’t showing proper gratitude to the United States.
In a Sunday New York Times column (paywall) titled “Trump Is Doing Real Damage to America,” conservative columnist, David French, assessed the situation as follows:
“Consider what happened in the Oval Office on Friday. Trump and Vice President JD Vance ambushed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on live television. Vance accused Zelensky of being ‘disrespectful,’ and Trump attacked him directly…
“Trump’s attack on Zelensky is just the latest salvo against our allies. Back in office, Trump has taught our most important strategic partners a lesson they will not soon forget: America can — and will — change sides. Its voters may indeed choose a leader who will abandon our traditional alliances and actively support one of the world’s most dangerous and oppressive regimes.
“Even if Democrats sweep the midterms in 2026 and defeat the Republican candidate in 2028, that lesson will still hold. Our allies will know that our alliances are only as stable as the next presidential election — and that promises are only good for one term (at most).
“It’s extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to build a sustainable defense strategy under those circumstances. It’s impossible to enact sustainable trade policies. And it’s impossible to conduct any form of lasting diplomacy. If agreements are subject to immediate revocation with the advent of a new administration, will any sensible world power rely on America’s word — or America itself?”
The answer is obvious. Trump just switched sides in a three-year old war, moving to the side of the invader and dictator, Vladimir Putin, while leaving our allies in Europe in stunned disbelief.
European historian, Timothy Snyder, called Trump’s actions in the Oval Office on Friday a failure of hospitality, decency, democracy, strategy, and independence. Trump screamed at an invited guest to the Oval Office, the elected leader of an allied country, who is enduring the barbarisms of Russia, including the murder of civilians, torture and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children. More than two centuries of good manners and protocol were shredded in those ten minutes.
Trump had set the stage for attempting to browbeat Zelensky into submission to Trump’s terms for an agreement by calling Zelensky a dictator in mid February and preposterously blaming Ukraine for starting the war with Russia. In late February, the Trump administration voted with authoritarian regimes in Russia and North Korea on a United Nations resolution on Ukraine that was not supported by our democratic allies in Europe.
The spectacle of a President Trump going unhinged and screaming at an invited guest to the Oval Office should have been foreseen by the under-oath testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, concerning Trump’s first term in office. Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee that Donald Trump cared so deeply about how he was perceived on television that he threw his lunch, on a porcelain plate, against the wall in a West Wing dining room after watching then Attorney General William Barr on TV dismissing that there was any evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, as Trump had claimed time and again. As many books on Trump have made clear, looking like a loser can send Trump into a fit of rage.
Hutchinson testified as follows:
“I noticed there was Ketchup dripping down the wall. And there’s a shattered porcelain plate on the floor. The valet had articulated that the President was extremely angry at the Attorney General’s AP interview and had thrown his lunch against the wall.”
While the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to make excuses for Trump’s dangerous behavior – even after Trump bizarrely threatened to take over Gaza, Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal – this erratic and authoritarian behavior is irreparably savaging the reputation of the United States around the globe.
The winner of this U.S. reputational destruction is, of course, Vladimir Putin.
