Is Zelenskyy a dictator? No. Is he to blame for the war? No. What’s up with Trump now? In my previous video, I tried to say I want to keep calm and carry on. I’ll try to maintain that spirit, but I feel the need to reiterate that what we’re seeing from the Trump government, or from Trump himself rather, is highly unusual. If that is his style of negotiating, it is off-putting, to say it mildly. We know he is hyperbolic, we know he makes statements that can’t always be taken literally because he has an ulterior motive.
We know that Zelenskyy didn’t sign that rare earth agreement yet, which was understandable given that it made outrageous demands that are possibly in violation with the constitution of Ukraine, without any quid pro quo on security guarantees.
Furthermore, Trump keeps saying that if he had been President, the war would never have happened. News flash: the war started in 2014. The war continued on Trump’s watch. He didn’t do anything to help – well, he did some things to prepare for Russian onslaught, so he did arm Ukraine, but he didn’t do anything really in his first term to push Putin to withdraw from Crimea and Luhansk back then. So no, Donald Trump is responsible for part of it, and yes, the war already started in 2014, and we just had a very awkward phase leading up to the full-scale invasion, but that didn’t mean that there was peace.
If you make statements like he did, maybe in the hope that it will now push the Europeans to up their effort, or maybe that’s going to be the result… I can tell you as someone who is from Europe, these remarks aren’t sitting well. People kind of know that this is Trump’s personality, but the longer this goes on unchecked or uncountered by the rest of the Republican Party, the worse this looks for the Republican Party, the worse this looks for the United States.
Donald Trump is embarrassing the United States right now. He’s not making America great again, he’s making America… I don’t even know – weird, seemingly unreliable, seemingly anti-democratic, pro-Putin. I don’t even know how to describe it. I’m trying to be nice here, I can’t always. Could be that Trump in the next day or two says the opposite and says “Yeah, yeah, you know, we’re all best friends” and whatever – he’s known to do that. That may work as a real estate salesperson and developer, but as a president, you’re also the Chief Diplomat, and this wasn’t diplomatic.
Is Zelenskyy a dictator? No. He is the elected president of Ukraine. Ukraine would have had elections if there wasn’t a war going on. The war has to lead to martial law because you have to protect your people. Russia attacks civilian structures every single day – of course martial law makes sense. There’s no way Ukraine can hold elections now, not even under a ceasefire before a permanent peace deal, because we know that Putin is flooding the airwaves and the internet with propaganda.
Some of it seems to be reaching the White House. We know that Tulsi Gabbard has been full of it, and Tucker Carlson and others, and who knows who’s talking to Trump. We know that his people were talked to by Lavrov, the liar-in-chief of Russia, and so that’s where some of these ideas are coming from. You cannot hold elections if 20% of your territory is occupied, if the remainder is under constant attack, if you have hundreds of thousands of soldiers on duty, millions of people abroad in exile, and any candidate turning out against Zelenskyy – maybe other than Vitali Klitschko – at immediate risk of Russian subversion.
Because that’s the Russian play here: ceasefire, Ukrainian elections during which the Russians would prop up a candidate who then makes Ukraine into a Russian asset that now inherits all these American and European weapons. Don’t you see the danger here?
Ukraine with Zelenskyy is a state that is fighting for democracy. Undermining Ukraine’s fight means undermining democracy. Democracy has worked well for Donald Trump – I hope he realizes that. In no other system but a democratic system would he have become president. He’s too impulsive, has this fixation of being a CEO. He’s not a CEO, he’s the president. He is Article Two of the Constitution, not Article One. Thank you, hello Congress, do something.
I can tell you who is not a legitimately elected person – that’s Vladimir Putin. He hasn’t had real elections for years. He has had sham elections, he has propped up quasi-candidates from other parties that have supported him, and the only real contenders to Russian politics like Navalny and others have been killed, pushed out of the country, or otherwise silenced. Putin has not won any election recently – he has manipulated a beauty contest, maybe.
So who’s not elected here? It’s Putin. Sure, Zelenskyy is in his fifth year and the country is in an emergency. He would have elections as soon as there is a reliable peace deal. Without an iota of a chance of Russia succeeding and subverting the democratic election, Ukraine can have them.
So what now? Europe, stop whining. You know what Trump is like. Get it done, support Ukraine, help it to win. Talk to Trump, tell Trump we’re going to take the lead here – you focus on the Pacific, you focus on the next threat. We’re going to make NATO and the US great again by helping Ukraine, by helping democracy.
People who voted for Donald Trump voted because they were fed up with the state of American democracy. They wanted it better, they wanted it to work for them. Donald Trump allegedly represented the forgotten man, some days the forgotten woman, his people. Maybe some of them think democracy was dysfunctional, but I have yet to talk to or read about a sizable portion of the American public that wants a dictatorship. Americans don’t want that – they want freedom, they want democracy, and they want democracy to work.
So maybe it’s up to the people also to tell Donald Trump: not like this. Do your job, do what you were elected to do, but don’t make us into a nation that is not respected anymore in the world. Restore USAID, at least the functions that are necessary and legitimate. Help Ukraine. Keep the US open for business. Keep the US functioning. Don’t make us look like we’re Putin’s puppet.
If you want to do this via a tough negotiator style, maybe there are other ways to do it than to insult the one man that is quasi now the leader of the free world, and that’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He is truly a servant of the people. He stood up when Russia started attacking, and make no mistake about it – Russia’s demands were that NATO withdraw from everything that they’ve built up as a defensive posture since the 1990s. I remember the terms that Putin had. This wasn’t about Ukraine, this was about Europe and the US, about NATO, which was deterring Putin from attacking his former Soviet slave empire.
Putin is against the United States. How deluded do you have to be to think that Putin might be an ally? Putin is on his last leg. Yes, Ukraine is suffering, Russia is suffering too. Just get it done and stop with the nonsense, please. I mean, seriously – now all over the world there are people looking at the United States and saying “What’s going on here?” This is unacceptable. See, I wanted to keep calm and I’m still annoyed. Thanks, Donald Trump.
Ceterum censeo Ucrainam esse defendam. Слава Україні!
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 