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I think the Zelensky thing is actually misunderstood. What Trump and Vance were doing was asserting control. Zelensky was used to dealing with Biden and the Left and having the USA government roll over and hand him several billion dollars. In the clip, the entire point is making it clear to Zelensky that he’s not in charge anymore, and that if he wants the US to help him, he has to accept our terms — which all told, and given the circumstances Ukraine is in, are actually pretty generous. But unless the people running the country actually assert themselves m there’s no reason to take it seriously.
I would say the same for the deep state. The reason to go in and pause payments and force people to prove they’re working is two-fold. First, the obvious benefit of cutting the fat. It needs to be done. But the other benefit is that it puts the deep state in its place, where it is on notice that it serves the elected government, and the days when they could simply roll their eyes and ignore the government are over and you better get with the program.
If you want to make actual changes in how things are done, you cannot be timid or nice about it. If you show weakness, you’ll be walked all over. Better to be overbearing but get the job done than be weak and try to explain in four years why nothing of note has changed. And I think most of this posturing now will pay off later. Iran and Syria and Hamas are watching Trump and Zelensky. They know they’re no longer dealing with Sleepy Joe who will maybe pretend to be bothered by what they’re doing but be too weak to do anything but tut-tut while they walk all over him. Trump, and thus the USA are done being the teat the world suckles while getting nothing in return, and are done being openly disrespected.
The written deal on offer at that meeting, to the best of our knowledge, was that Zelenskyy signs a mineral deal which in expectation transfers value from Ukraine to the US, and gets nothing in return. Trump was explicitly not offering any kind of security guarantee or military assistance, and can't offer a ceasefire because negotiations between Trump and Putin are still at the talking-about-talks stage. Zelenskyy had successfully negotiated the negative economic EV of the deal down to a de minimis level, and was in Washington to sign a mostly-irrelevant mineral deal as a confidence-building measure.
Assuming all parties were acting sensibly rather than having a destructive snit, something happened immediately before or during the press conference that made it clear that the mineral deal - or rather the as yet unwritten deal that the mineral deal was a confidence-building step towards - didn't work. And it is fairly obvious what that disagreement was. The two key negative turning points are when Trump asks Zelenskyy to come out in favour of a ceasefire (Zelenskyy is quite properly unwilling to do anything that reads as committing to support a US-negotiated ceasefire until he knows what it might look like) while Zelenskyy asks Trump to promise further military support against Russia if Russia misbehaves (which Trump has made clear he doesn't want to do). The disagreement is that Trump sees the end goal as Ukraine agreeing to a ceasefire negotiated between the US and Russia, and Zelenskyy sees the end goal as changing the balance of power such that Russia might plausibly agree to a ceasefire on reasonable terms.
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