tRUMP IS PUTIN'S BITCH!

The Real Reason Trump Berated Zelensky
He simply likes Vladimir Putin better.
By Jonathan Chait
Photo-illustration of a cutout black-and-white image of Volodymyr Zelensky 
(left) and Donald Trump (right) sitting next to each other, seemingly mid-
argument.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty.
February 28, 2025
Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office 
meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during 
which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was 
particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-
fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if 
anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as 
if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most 
unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event.
Then Trump explained just why he deemed such an event so unlikely. “They 
respect me,” he thundered. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a 
lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and 
Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? … It was a 
phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”
Trump seems to genuinely feel that he and Vladimir Putin forged a personal 
bond through the shared trauma of being persecuted by the Democratic Party. 
Trump is known for his cold-eyed, transactional approach, and yet here he 
was, displaying affection and loyalty. (At another point, Trump complained 
that Zelensky has “tremendous hatred” toward Putin and insisted, “It’s very 
tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.”) He was not explaining 
why a deal with Russia would advance America’s interests, or why honoring 
it would advance Russia’s. He was defending Russia’s integrity by vouching 
for Putin’s character.
In recent years, the kinship between Trump and Putin has become somewhat 
unfashionable to point out. After Robert Mueller disappointed liberals by 
failing to prove a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and 
Russia, conventional wisdom on much of the center and left of the political 
spectrum came to treat the scandal as overblown. But even the facts Mueller 
was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, 
were astonishing. Putin dangled a Moscow building deal in front of the 
Trump Organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and Trump lied 
about it, giving Putin leverage over him. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul 
Manafort, was in business with a Russian intelligence officer. Russia 
published hacked Democratic emails at a time when they were maximally 
useful to Trump’s campaign, and made another hacking attempt after he asked 
it on television to find missing emails from Hillary Clinton. The pattern 
of cooperation between Trump and Putin may not have been provably criminal, 
but it was extraordinarily damning.
Conservatives have invested even more heavily in denying any basis for the 
Trump-Russia scandal. A handful of MAGA devotees have openly endorsed 
Russian propaganda, but more Republicans have explained away Trump’s 
behavior as reflecting some motivation other than outright sympathy for 
Moscow: He is transactional, he is a nationalist, he admires strength and 
holds weakness in contempt.
And it is all true: Trump does admire dictators. He does instinctively side 
with bullies over victims. He does lack any values-based framework for 
American foreign policy. But many Republicans who acknowledged these traits 
nonetheless believed that Trump could be persuaded to stay in Ukraine’s 
corner. They were wrong. The reason they were wrong is that, in addition to 
his generalized amorality, Trump exhibits a particular affection for Putin 
and Russia.
Immediately after Zelensky left the Oval Office, Trump posted to Truth 
Social, “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace 
if America is involved.” The clear implication is that the United States 
will cut off its support for the Ukrainian war effort. Trump’s allies have 
already tried to foist the blame for that momentous decision onto Zelensky. 
Trump “felt disrespected” by the Ukrainian leader’s body language and 
argumentative manner, White House officials told Fox News. “Zelensky was in 
a terrible position,” National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry 
acknowledged on X, “but he never should have gotten sucked into making 
argumentative points.” And, he added, “he should have worn a suit.”
All of this ignores the much more plausible explanation of what happened 
today: It was a setup. Trump and Vance appear to have entered the meeting 
with the intention of berating Zelensky and drawing him into an argument as 
a pretext for the diplomatic break. Why should anyone have expected 
anything different? Trump has been regurgitating Russian propaganda, not 
only regarding Ukraine, since before Zelensky even assumed office. In 2018, 
the year preceding Zelensky’s election, he defended Russia’s seizure of 
Crimea; he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian guilt for various 
murders; and he has even stuck to Russian talking points on such 
idiosyncratic topics as the Soviets’ supposedly defensive rationale for 
invading Afghanistan in 1979 and their fear that an “aggressive” Montenegro 
would attack Russia, dragging NATO into war.
In the past few weeks, Trump has made very little effort to conceal his 
pro-Russian tilt. He called Zelensky a dictator, and when asked if he would 
say the same about Putin, refused, insisting, “I don’t use those words 
lightly.” (No president in American history has used words more lightly 
than Trump.) He said Ukraine “may be Russian someday” and blamed Ukraine 
for starting the war. The U.S. even joined Russia, North Korea, and a tiny 
bloc of Russian allies to vote against a United Nations resolution 
condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The less damning explanations for Trump’s pattern of pro-Russia positions 
have all collapsed in the face of evidence. One line of defense, hauled out 
by Republican hawks to explain away Trump’s consistent efforts to undermine 
NATO, is that Trump actually wants to prod Europe into spending more on its 
own defense. Like a tough football coach, he is merely berating his team to 
become the best version of itself.
Except when European countries declared themselves ready to increase their 
defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, the level Trump claimed to have 
wanted, he upped the demand to 5 percent. More recently, he advocated for 
the election of the right-wing, pro-Russian, anti-NATO AfD party in 
Germany. That is a strange thing to do if your goal is to push allies to 
stand up for themselves against Russia, but a perfectly sensible position 
if your goal is to undermine the anti-Russia alliance.
Republican Russia-hawks hoped they could bring Trump around by getting 
Ukraine to sign a deal handing over a portion of its mineral wealth to the 
United States. Instead, Trump announced that the mineral deal was dead. 
This, too, would be a strange move if his motives were purely 
transactional, but a very understandable one if his motives were to abandon 
Ukraine to Putin’s tender mercies.
Even today, Trump’s bullying commenced well before Zelensky had opened his 
mouth. Trump greeted his counterpart on the White House driveway with 
condescending mockery, pointing at him and telling onlookers, “He’s all 
dressed up today,” like Bill Batts in Goodfellas belittling Joe Pesci’s 
character. (“Hey, Tommy, all dressed up!”) Zelensky’s attire—the Ukrainian 
president wears military attire, not a suit, to remind the world that his 
country is at war—has been a fixation on the right, and conservatives have 
seized upon it as a pretext to blame him for Trump’s anger. Oddly, they did 
not seem to mind that Elon Musk showed up at the White House this week in a 
T-shirt and baseball cap.
Might Zelensky have gotten a different outcome by taking Trump’s abuse and 
stream of lies with more self-abasement? Sure, it’s possible; if you reason 
backwards from a bad outcome, any different strategy is almost 
axiomatically smarter. Zelensky had no good options at the White House. He 
walked into an ambush with a president who empathizes with the dictator who 
wants to seize Ukraine’s territory. Everyone who spent years warning about 
Trump’s unseemly affinity for Putin had exactly this kind of disastrous 
outcome in mind.