The Ukrainian president met the King at his Norfolk residence following a summit of European leaders in London.

Kim Jong Un stared blankly as I spoke.

The North Korean dictator was seated across a small table from President Donald Trump, the two leaders and their entourages tucked away in a meeting room of a luxury hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was their second summit, this one in February 2019—an event that the United States hoped would de-escalate the threat posed by the rogue nuclear nation, and one that Trump had told aides might yield him a Nobel Peace Prize. But I wanted to ask the president about something on the other side of the globe.

“Mr. President, do you have any reaction to Michael Cohen and his testimony?” I asked from a few feet away.

Trump scowled and shook his head. Kim didn’t react. The dozen other American reporters who were there and I were abruptly pulled from the room. And when the summit later adjourned without a deal, Trump blamed the stalled negotiations on the distractions caused by Cohen, his former lawyer, who had appeared before a Democratic-led congressional committee back in Washington hours earlier and delivered explosive testimony in which he labeled Trump a “racist,” “con man,” and “cheat.”

Trump later told aides on Air Force One that he didn’t like my question. And, certainly, he had the right to respond to it however he saw fit or to choose not to respond at all. But most important was that I had the ability to ask it at all—that a journalist, protected by the freedom of speech, could directly challenge the president about any subject of his or her choosing.

[Read: The day Trump became un-president]

I was able to do so that day only because I was part of what’s known as the White House press pool. Established during the Eisenhower administration, the pool is a small, rotating group of journalists who stand in for the rest of the press corps when security or space limitations prevent a larger number of reporters and photographers from being present—for example, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or, in this case, in a small room in Vietnam. Across generations of Democratic and Republican presidencies, the pool system has, with remarkable speed, kept the American public informed about what the president is doing on a daily basis.

In his first term, Trump went along with the system. But this week he made clear that he no longer would: The White House press secretary announced that the administration would disband the daily rotation, long coordinated by the White House Correspondents’ Association, and instead handpick which journalists would be allowed to follow the president.

That change might seem trivial to many Americans—just a Beltway-insider controversy or a fight among celebrity correspondents jockeying over who has access to the president. But it represents a dangerous moment for American democracy. If, as it has begun to do, the White House gives preference to Trump-friendly outlets, it will restrict the ability of fair, independent journalists to hold some of the most powerful people on the planet to account and to expose the president’s actions and decisions.

“Our job is to push the president beyond his comfort space to respond to questions that otherwise they’re never asked,” Peter Baker, the longtime New York Times correspondent who has covered the White House since 1996, told me. “Now he’s sending a signal that If you write something we don’t like, you’re out. You don’t get to be here anymore.”

The announcement this week follows the White House’s recent banishment of the Associated Press from the pool and White House events after the outlet refused to go along with Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” AP journalists have been allowed to keep their hard passes, security clearances that allow them access to the White House campus. But they are clearly being punished by the president for the words they use to cover him. The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the journalists who report on the day-to-day doings of the president and works with the West Wing to facilitate press access, objected to the decision. The AP, in a statement, said the move “plainly violates the First Amendment” and is suing the White House over the ban; a federal judge this week did not offer an immediate ruling but also did not restore the outlet’s access, causing the Trump administration to claim “victory.” (I worked at the AP for eight years, including while on that presidential trip to Vietnam, and am a member of the WHCA.)

[Read: Intimidating Americans will not work]

By overriding the entire pool system, the White House has now gone one step further. The WHCA represents nearly 300 news organizations—from a wide range of ideological viewpoints, including conservative ones—that are accredited to cover the president. It has long determined the identities of the outlets and reporters in the pool with no input from the White House. About three dozen outlets rotate, on an alphabetical basis, pool duties at the White House; a smaller number participate in what’s known as the travel pool, following the president when he leaves White House grounds, because of the costs involved. (The media organizations themselves cover those costs, not taxpayers.) When he travels, 13 journalists—a mix of correspondents, photographers, and technicians—go along with him (because that’s how many seats are in the press cabin of Air Force One). When the president is at the White House, the number increases slightly. In both cases, those in the pool send out information through reports that are distributed directly to the other members of the WHCA.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House would no longer use the WHCA’s rotation. The next day, Reuters joined AP in losing its scheduled shift; Blaze Media, a conservative outlet making its debut in the pool, and Axios—one of the few outlets to adopt the “Gulf of America” name—were allowed in. Today, two more partisan, right-leaning outlets—One America News and The Federalist—received pool slots. And a reporter from the Russian state news agency TASS was allowed to gain access to today’s Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the AP and Reuters were not. That reporter was later removed by staffers for “not being on the approved list,” according to the White House.

“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” Eugene Daniels, the president of WHCA’s board and a Politico correspondent soon leaving to host an MSNBC show, said in a statement earlier this week. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The mere presence of the pool is important; its reporters stand poised at just about any moment to provide the nation with real-time updates on the president’s actions and health. The pool is there if the president travels to Boston or Beijing or just up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. It has been on hand for some of the nation’s most historic moments, including when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas and when George W. Bush was scrambled into the Florida skies after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center. It has been there when presidents made unannounced trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. And it’s there for mundane moments too, with reporters sometimes sitting for hours in vans while the president golfs.

The pool’s purpose is not just stenography about what the president says or a daily diary of what he does. Pool reports, compiled by independent journalists and untouched by any government officials, are often full of answers to unsparing questions posed by pool reporters. Trump feeds off media attention and, at times, enjoys going back and forth with reporters. He is accessible to the press and answers far more questions than his immediate predecessors. But most of the questions he fields are in spontaneous sessions with members of the pool, in the Oval Office, in the Cabinet room, or on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. He takes far fewer questions in larger news-conference settings with the full press corps, and he doesn’t regularly sit for one-on-one interviews other than with friendly, right-leaning interlocutors.

If the pool is now stacked with right-wing journalists, Trump will face fewer challenging questions, a blow to transparency and Americans’ ability to keep tabs on the most powerful person in their government. Ron Fournier, who covered the White House for the AP for more than a decade beginning in 1993, described such a system to me as “state media.”

[Read: The free-speech phonies]

“That is not a democracy,” Fournier said. “If this precedent holds, every future president will want the same deal.”

The changes to the pool system are all the more worrying because they are part of a larger attack on the press from the White House. No president likes his media coverage, but no one before Trump has made the press such a part of the story. Trump has long deemed journalists “the enemy of the people” while deriding institutions and individual reporters (me included), and he has successfully inspired fear in the Fourth Estate. His litigation prompted ABC to pay $15 million to his presidential library in a settlement. His Federal Communications Commission has opened investigations into PBS, NPR, and the parent company of NBC. Trump threatened this week to sue members of the media over anonymous sources, claiming that “a big price” should be paid for stories he doesn’t like. The Pentagon has told reporters that it will eliminate its own pool that travels with the defense secretary. And before taking office, Trump’s FBI director mused about targeting journalists he believes have covered the president unfairly.

The WHCA circulated a letter this week that was signed by 39 outlets protesting the changes to the pool. Some right-leaning organizations, such as Fox News and Newsmax, signed the letter, warning that a future Democratic president might exclude conservative media outlets. Newsmax’s owner, Chris Ruddy, made that case to Leavitt yesterday, a person familiar with the meeting told me. The press secretary was unmoved by the argument, the person said. (Ruddy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) She has stated publicly that the changes to the pool will allow a more diverse set of outlets to cover the president. In response to a social-media post from Baker, the New York Times correspondent, criticizing the move, Leavitt wrote, “Gone are the days where left-wing stenographers posing as journalists, such as yourself, dictate who gets to ask what.”

Members of the WHCA board continued negotiations with the White House yesterday. Reporters have speculated that Trump will get bored of softball questions from friendly outlets or that the White House will tire of shouldering the logistics of staging press events without the WHCA’s help. Some of the White House correspondents I have talked to in recent days have floated the idea of boycotting covering Trump events in protest, but others, including members of TV networks, have pushed back on the idea. Among the fears: that a boycott could cause the White House to fully stock the pool with sycophantic outlets, or to disband it completely.

Some rank-and-file WHCA members have also advocated for canceling the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual black-tie celebration of the First Amendment scheduled for late April, because of the bad optics that would be produced by scenes of correspondents mingling with administration officials who have cut back on press access. But calling off the event would deprive the organization of its best yearly opportunity to raise money for journalism scholarships and operating expenses. For now, the dinner is on.

Although presidents are always invited, Trump did not attend the event during any of his first four years in office. A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, told me that Trump had not decided whether to attend this year’s dinner, but that many of his aides were urging him to go—“to make clear that he owns you.”

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At least the Oval Office meeting held by President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was held in front of the cameras. False friendliness in public by Trump and Vance, followed by behind-the-scenes treachery, would have been much more dangerous to the Ukrainian cause.

Instead, Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it’s necessary to face it.

Today’s meeting gave the lie to any claim that this administration’s policy is driven by any strategic effort to advance the interests of the United States, however misguided. Trump and Vance displayed in the Oval Office a highly personal hatred. There was no effort here to make a case for American interests. Vance complained that Zelensky had traveled to Pennsylvania to thank U.S. ammunition workers, because, Vance charged, the appearance amounted to campaigning for the Democratic presidential ticket. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump angrily explained. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Both the president and vice president showed the U.S.-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America’s allies—and who deeply sympathize with the world’s most aggressive dictator.

Through the Cold War period, Americans were haunted by the fear that a person with clandestine loyalties to a hostile foreign power might somehow rise to high office. In the late 1940s, the Alger Hiss case convulsed the country. Hiss’s accusers charged—and it later proved true—that Hiss had betrayed U.S. secrets to Soviet spymasters in the 1930s, when Hiss served as a junior official in the Department of Agriculture. The secrets were not very important; they included designs for a new fire extinguisher for U.S. naval ships. But Hiss himself was a rising star. The possibility that a person with such secrets in his past might someday go on to head the Department of State or Central Intelligence Agency once tormented Americans.

But what if the loyalties were not clandestine, not secret? What if a leader just plain blurted out on national television that he despises our allies, rejects treaties, and regards a foreign adversary as a personal friend? What if he did it again and again? Human beings get used to anything. But this?

It’s not hard to imagine a president of Estonia or Moldova in that Oval Office chair, being berated by Trump and Vance. Or a president of Taiwan. Or, for that matter, the leaders of core U.S. partners such as Germany and Japan, which entrusted their nations’ security to the faith and patriotism of past American leaders, only to be confronted by the faithless men who hold the highest offices today.

We’re witnessing the self-sabotage of the United States. “America First” always meant America alone, a predatory America whose role in the world is no longer based on democratic belief. America voted at the United Nations earlier this week against Ukraine, siding with Russia and China against almost all of its fellow democracies. Is this who Americans want to be? For this is what America is being turned into.

The Trump administration’s elimination of PEPFAR, the American program to combat HIV infection in Africa, symbolizes the path ahead. President George W. Bush created the program because it would do immense good at low cost, and thereby demonstrate to the world the moral basis of American power. His successors continued it, and Congresses of both parties funded it, because they saw that the program advanced both U.S. values and U.S. interests. Trump and Vance don’t want the United States to be that kind of country anymore.

American allies urgently need a Plan B for collective security in a world where the U.S. administration prefers Vladimir Putin to Zelensky.

The American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name—and the services they are performing for dictators and aggressors. There may not be a deep cause here. Trump likes and admires bad people because he is himself a bad person. When Vance executed his personal pivot from Never Trump to Always Trump, he needed a way to prove that he had truly crossed over to the dark side beyond any possibility of reversion or redemption; perhaps his support for Russia allowed him to do that. But however shallow their motives, the consequences are profound.

In his first term, Trump sometimes seemed a rogue actor within his own administration. The president expressed strange and disquieting opinions, but his Cabinet secretaries were mostly normal and responsible people. The oddball appointees on the White House staff were contained by the many more-or-less normal appointees. This time, Trump is building a national-security system to follow his lead. He has intimidated or persuaded his caucus in the House to accept—and his caucus in the Senate not to oppose—his pro-authoritarian agenda.

The good and great America that once inspired global admiration—that good and great America still lives. But it no longer commands a consensus above party. The pro-Trump party exposed its face to the world in the Oval Office today. Nobody who saw that face will ever forget the grotesque sight.

Updated at 11:13 a.m. ET on March 1, 2025

Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.

Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting.

Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio—in theory, America’s top diplomat—was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.

[Read: At least now we know the truth]

Zelensky objected, as he should have, when the vice president castigated the Ukrainian president for not showing enough personal gratitude to Trump. And then in a moment of immense hypocrisy, Vance told Zelensky that it was “disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.” But baiting Zelensky into fighting in front of the media was likely the plan all along, and Trump and Vance were soon both yelling at Zelensky. (“This is going to be great television,” Trump said during the meeting.) The president at times sounded like a Mafia boss—“You don’t have the cards”; “you’re buried there”—but in the end, he sounded like no one so much as Putin himself as he hollered about “gambling with World War III,” as if starting the biggest war in Europe in nearly a century was Zelensky’s idea.

After the meeting, Trump dismissed the Ukrainian leader and then issued a statement that could only have pleased Moscow:

I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.

Trump might as well have dictated this post on Truth Social before the meeting, because Zelensky didn’t stand a chance of having an actual discussion at the White House. When he showed Trump pictures of brutalized Ukrainian soldiers, Trump shrugged. “That’s tough stuff,” he muttered. Perhaps someone told Zelensky that Trump doesn’t read much, and reacts to images, but Trump, uncharacteristically, seems to have been determined to stay on message and pick a fight.

Vance, for his part, fully inhabited the role of a smarmy talk-show sidekick, jumping in to make sure the star got the support he needed while slamming one of the guests. The vice president is an unserious man who tries to insert himself into serious moments, but this time the stakes were much higher than the usual dustups with the media or congressional Democrats. He chuckled as Brian Glenn, a journalist from the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice who is reportedly dating Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, asked Zelensky the tough and incisive question of why he had not worn a suit in the Oval Office. (Perhaps he’ll ask Musk why he wore a hat and T-shirt to a Cabinet meeting, but I doubt it.)

The sheer rudeness shown to a foreign guest and friend of the United States was (to use a word) deplorable as a matter of manners and grace, but worse, Trump and Vance acted like a couple of online Kremlin sock puppets instead of American leaders. They pushed talking points that they either knew or should have known were wrong. Even if Zelensky were as fluent and capable in English as Winston Churchill, he would never have been able to rebut the flood of falsehoods. No, the U.S. has not given Ukraine $350 billion; yes, Zelensky has repeatedly expressed his thanks to America and to Trump; no, Zelensky was not attacking the administration. The Ukrainian leader did his best to stand up to the bullying, but Trump and Vance were playing to the cameras and the MAGA gallery at home.

Vance showed how dedicated he was to point-scoring rather than policy making with an observation so shallow that he was lucky that Zelensky was too off-balance to call him out for it. To emphasize Ukraine’s perilous situation, Vance noted that Zelensky was sending conscripts to the front lines, as if this was an unprecedented policy that only the most desperate regime would dare enact. Zelensky said that all nations at war have problems, but he might have pointed out to Vance that Ukraine is fighting for its very existence, while the United States has dragged conscripts to places far from home—including Korea and Vietnam—to fight against troops supported by the Kremlin.

[Tom Nichols: Don’t blame Zelensky]

Today’s meeting and America’s shameful vote in the United Nations on Monday confirmed that the United States is now aligned with Russia and against Ukraine, Europe, and most of the planet. I felt physically sick watching the president of the United States yell at a brave ally, fulminating in the Oval Office as if he were an addled old man shaking his fist at a television. Zelensky has endured tragedies, and risked his life, in ways that men such as Trump and Vance cannot imagine. (Vance served as a public-relations officer in the most powerful military in the world; he has never had to huddle in a bunker during a Russian bombardment.) I am ashamed for my nation; even if Congress acts to support and aid Ukraine, it cannot restore the American honor lost today.

But no matter how disgusted anyone might be at Trump and Vance’s behavior, the strategic reality is that this meeting is a catastrophe for the United States and the free world. America’s alliances are now in danger, and should be: Trump is openly, and gleefully, betraying everything America has tried to defend since the defeat of the Axis 80 years ago. The entire international order of peace and security is now in danger, as Russian autocrats, after slaughtering innocent people for three years, look forward to enjoying the spoils of their invasion instead of standing trial for their crimes. (Shortly after Trump dismissed Zelensky from the White House, Putin’s homunculus, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, posted on X: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office.”)

Friday, February 28, 2025, will go into the history books as one of the grimmest days in American diplomacy, the beginning of a long-term disaster that every American, every U.S. ally, and anyone who cares about the future of democracy will have to endure. With the White House’s betrayal of Ukraine capping a month of authoritarian chaos in America, Putin, along with other dictators around the world, can finally look at Trump with confidence and think: one of us.

This article previously misstated J. D. Vance’s former military role.

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.

One of the stranger moments among many in yesterday’s White House presser turned grudge match with Volodymyr Zelensky was a query about the Ukrainian president’s outfit. He was in town to sign a deal that would give the United States a big stake in his country’s rare-earth minerals and, hopefully, some newfound motivation to help fend off Russia’s aggression. He opted for all black, a sleek, collarless shirt and pants that was more elegant than his usual fatigues (President Donald Trump remarked that he was “all dressed up today” when he first greeted him), but he still stood out for not being in a suit and tie. This prompted a cheeky question from Brian Glenn, a correspondent for the pro-Trump outlet Real America’s Voice. “Why don’t you wear a suit?” Glenn asked Zelensky. “You’re in the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit. Do you own a suit!?”

Inane though the question might have been, it pointed to a stylistic gulf that separates Trump and Zelensky, and that may have contributed to the eventual blowup over whether Ukraine can still count the United States an ally in fighting off Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Both presidents are showmen (and former television entertainers) who have carefully crafted their public images, but they are as different in style as Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini: steely versus bombastic, slyly cutting versus openly mocking, understated and dry versus blunt and derisive.  

To Glenn’s leading question, Zelensky responded with what to my ears was a humor as dark as Ukrainian black bread. “I will wear a costume after this war will finish,” Zelensky said. “Maybe something like yours. Maybe something better, I don’t know. We will see. Maybe something cheaper.”

Over the past three years, Zelensky has fashioned for himself a leader-in-wartime look, with his scruffy facial hair and a gravelly voice. He speaks in matter-of-fact ways, referring to Putin early in the meeting as a “killer and terrorist.” An actor before he became president, Zelensky has so much embodied this role that it seemed nearly impossible for him to abandon his practiced fortitude as Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, presented an alternate reality in which Zelensky and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, were just two men who refused to get along.

[Read: How Zelensky gave the Jewish world a hero]

Unlike French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who appeared next to Trump last week and kept quiet and patient while the American president bloviated, Zelensky, equally invested in his own persona, found this impossible. He took his turn to answer questions Trump had already fielded. He raised his eyebrows or swiveled his head at particularly outlandish assertions, playing subtly to the cameras. When Trump gave a both-sides account of battlefield losses, he interjected, quietly but clearly, “They came to OUR country.” Admirable as his truth-telling may have been, it also set off Trump and his vice president in ways that may not have been strategic.

The more they berated him for not being grateful enough, for not appreciating that he was supposed to play the supplicant, the more Zelensky snapped into the mode he has perfected. “You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump told him. “I’m not playing cards,” Zelensky shot back, eyes narrowed in skepticism.

Americans are very familiar with Trump’s exaggerated self-presentation: the carnival barker who leaps to superlatives. It wasn’t enough for him to describe Ukrainian cities as damaged by Russia. He had to say that many of them were “not recognizable, there’s not a building standing.” This is a rhetorical style as native to Trump as the long red tie dangling past his belt. He has no patience for shades of gray. Putin is a man he knows. Putin is a man who was treated badly like he was. Therefore, the president concludes, he can be trusted. If Trump says Putin will abide by a cease-fire, he will abide by a cease-fire. End of story.

Zelensky’s persona is, in its way, more carefully constructed—honed over time. In the early days of the invasion, in the videos he made of himself in which he insisted he would never leave Ukraine, he appeared giddy, the comedian he once was still visible in a slight smirk. But he was already learning how to transform his stocky 5-foot-7-inches frame into an embodiment of resolve, an important metonym for a relatively small but surprisingly tenacious country that nevertheless needs a great deal of outside help. When offered the chance to evacuate in the early days, he was reported to have said, “I need ammunition, not a ride,” like a Ukrainian Dirty Harry. As the war has dragged on, he has mastered that aura of cool and perseverance—jaw thrust forward, chest pushed out, terse and wry in his delivery. Asked once what he would do if Putin ever called him, he deadpanned, “How could he call me? He doesn’t have a mobile. I don’t use the telegraph.”

[Tom Nichols: It was an ambush]

What happened in the White House on Friday was a realignment of American foreign policy—a misfired negotiation or a perverse setup, depending on your perspective. But it was also an explosive chemical reaction catalyzed by the clash of two incompatible elements. To Trump, Zelensky’s stoicism came across as rude. And to Zelensky, Trump’s exaggerations came across as offensive. When Vance jumped in and suggested that maybe Ukraine could try diplomacy, a wire seemed to trip in Zelensky’s brain, and the role he has perfected—of a leader on the side of freedom against a murderous dictator—kicked in. After plainly enumerating the cease-fire agreements Putin has violated, he leaned forward and asked, “What kind of diplomacy, J. D., you are speaking about? What do you mean?” Vance accused him of being “disrespectful,” and the yelling soon started.

When Zelensky began speaking of the way America might one day “feel” the consequences of Putin’s victories, despite the buffer of its “nice ocean,” it was Trump’s turn to feel triggered. He sensed that Zelensky was stealing his show, setting himself up as the truly tough one, on the front line of a war from which Trump is shrinking away. This was not acceptable to the president. “You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel,” Trump scolded him. Only Trump himself can dictate what we feel. And only Trump can dictate how visitors to the Oval Office make their case. So he reasserted control by taking credit for enabling Zelensky’s straight talk: “The problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy,” he said.

It’s possible that Zelensky came into the meeting knowing that it was already too late for him and Ukraine, that Trump was too much on the side of Russia, and that he had little to gain from the obsequiousness that Trump and Vance had scripted for him. Regardless of what was in his best interest, Zelensky just couldn’t let things slide. If he had, he wouldn’t be himself. Trump, too, had to be himself; he couldn’t stay quiet.

The immediate result of this clash was that Zelensky’s trip to Washington appears to have been for naught. The deal on the table, which would give the United States a 50 percent stake in the revenues of Ukraine’s oil, gas, and minerals, was dead. It was designed to keep America invested in Ukraine’s future—at quite a high price—but Trump never seemed all that excited about it. What motivated him instead was what now seems to have been inevitable given these two men’s personalities: the opportunity for a smackdown. In his last words at the press conference, Trump made clear that he, at least, had gotten what he wanted: “This is going to be great television, I’ll tell you that.”

Hours after his election victory last Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), said on national television that he would try to “achieve independence from the U.S.A. I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” Merz continued, but “it is clear that the Americans … are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

American security guarantees have protected the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945. Never since then has a chancellor of that country suggested that it emancipate itself from Washington. Not even France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has called for building a “sovereign Europe” capable of defending itself since he was first elected in 2017, could have put the imperative in starker terms. So who is the incoming German chancellor making this transformative demand?

Merz is a conservative by any measure—social, fiscal, political—and far from being the avatar of a freethinking new generation in Germany, he may wind up being the last chancellor to hail from the old one. But history has plans for him. He will likely step into the highest office of Europe’s biggest economy and most powerful state just as the United States, under Donald Trump, abandons its post–World War II role on the continent. Merz, with his right-wing instincts and establishment roots, will be guiding his country, maybe even the continent, through a period of epochal change.

Already, Merz has pledged to increase defense spending and put Paris, Warsaw, and London at the lead of a new policy to shore up Ukraine’s sovereignty and defend Europe from Russia with or without the United States. He has even sought to explore whether France and Britain might extend their nuclear umbrella to the rest of Europe, in place of American protection. At any other time, this agenda of European self-reliance might be a radical one. Now it’s a logical response to events.

When he takes office, most likely at the end of April and at the helm of a coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Merz will not be riding a wave of enthusiasm. The CDU won just 28.6 percent of the vote in this election—almost eight points more than the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the second-worst showing of the party’s history. And Merz has a personal reputation for being cocky, ambitious, and overly cerebral. He’s a politician with hard edges, and many Germans, especially women, find him hard to like.

[Read: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

At 6 foot 5, the incoming chancellor literally looks down on most people he talks with. He is also a self-made multimillionaire who describes himself as “upper middle class” yet flies his own private propeller plane. He is a former artilleryman in the Bundeswehr who likes authority and orderliness, and he has a taste for cashmere V-neck sweaters and checkered shirts. Once, when a TV crew was following him for a day, he admonished an employee to brush their hair.

The postwar generation to which Merz belongs has governed Germany for decades. Its men and women were raised amid the country’s immediate moral reckoning with the horrors of the Nazi Reich, and they have made this imperative central to their vision. Merz’s grandfather was a Nazi brownshirt and the mayor of Brilon, a picturesque town in the country’s west where Merz also grew up. Two generations later, Merz has watched the rise of the far-right AfD with profound concern, calling it a “disgrace for Germany.”  

Merz’s life in Brilon was economically comfortable but not always easy or orderly. As a child, he spent six months in a tuberculosis clinic run by nuns—an experience he has dryly described as “not nice at all.” His sister was killed in a car crash at age 21. And he was an impatient and irascible teenager who had to leave his local high school for disciplinary reasons, and whose grades were so bad that he had to repeat a year.

Merz’s political career has been similarly jagged; he has probably survived more defeats than any other living German politician. A former judge, he rose to prominence as a member of Parliament in the 1990s as the standard-bearer for the conservative camp within the CDU. Yet in 2000, Merz lost a bid for party leadership to an unassuming East German named Angela Merkel. Once she became chancellor, Merkel made a point of marginalizing her most threatening rival.

Merz left politics in 2009 to make money—lots of it. He joined a law firm in Düsseldorf and sat on the boards of many big corporations, including prestigious investment firms such as BlackRock Germany, of which he was chair, as well as run-of-the-mill companies such as the toilet-paper producer WEPA. Nine years would pass before he returned to politics. By then, in 2018, Merkel was engulfed in criticism for having let nearly a million refugees into Germany from the Syrian civil war. Within minutes of her announcement that she would step down from the CDU leadership, Merz had a statement ready announcing his candidacy. But the CDU didn’t choose him—at least, not at first. Twice, it picked centrists in the mold of Merkel. But the party kept losing electoral ground. Finally, in 2022, its members saw fit to give Merz a chance to revive the CDU by shifting it to the right.

[Read: MAGA has found a new model]

Merz favored a politics of law and order and a relatively hard line on immigration. He has at one point even advocated declaring a state of emergency in order to push migrants back from Germany’s borders, something European Union law would otherwise prohibit. Only weeks ago, he passed a parliamentary motion calling for placing undocumented migrants awaiting deportation in closed facilities. This proposal got through only because it won the votes of the AfD. Merz had earlier promised never to work with the far-right party. Now he told critics that if the AfD wanted to vote for his proposal, he could hardly prevent it.

Some of Merz’s rhetoric around immigration sounds a lot like that of the populist right. He once called Ukrainian war refugees “social-welfare tourists”—though he later apologized for it. He has also designated the sons of migrants who fail to respect female schoolteachers “little pashas.” If all this was meant to reduce the AfD’s appeal by moving the CDU to the right, however, it was a failure. His tough talk did not prevent the AfD from capturing almost 21 percent of the vote this year—double what it got in 2021.

Merz’s economic views may be the ones most starkly challenged by the geopolitical moment he finds himself in. To wrest European security from the North American framework will require new investments, new programs, and, almost inevitably, big spending. Merz brings to this task the instincts of a free-marketeer impatient with government outlay and bureaucracy. In the 2000s, he promised that if he became finance minister, he’d make the income-tax form, which in Germany runs to dozens of pages, fit on a beer tap. In 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, Merz published a book arguing that Germany should cut back its welfare state, deregulate its economy, and encourage people to buy more stocks instead of letting their savings languish in bank accounts. Germany’s economy has stagnated for the past five years, and most of Merz’s solutions to that seem to come at the expense of workers or the environment: reducing unemployment benefits, creating incentives for Germans to work longer hours, and rolling back climate regulation. With the auto industry in crisis, he advocates removing the EU ban on internal-combustion-engine cars that is supposed to begin in 2035.

But conservative economic orthodoxies may soon run up against other priorities, some of them every bit as close to Merz’s core. Like most German politicians of the immediate postwar generation, Merz is a Europeanist. He sees the EU not as a constraint but as a conviction. He is an ardent supporter of Ukraine, having criticized his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, for backing Kyiv too timidly and walking in lockstep with President Joe Biden instead of choosing a more assertive course with Paris and London. Scholz once marketed himself as a “peace chancellor,” to which Merz quipped: “Peace you can find in any cemetery. It is our freedom that we must defend.”

[Read: Is it time to bury Merkel’s legacy?]

Merz wants Europe to become sovereign and free of foreign interference because he believes that the new administration in Washington, like Moscow, seeks to divide and undermine democracy in Europe. The White House, like the Kremlin, seems intent on intervening in elections on behalf of the far right, and on forcing Brussels to walk back regulations on Big Tech that might curtail disinformation and hate speech. Countering this agenda, when it was only a Russian one, was well in line with conservative German values. On Sunday, the chancellor-in-waiting said: “I have absolutely no illusions about what is happening from America. Just look at the recent interventions in the German election campaign by Mr. Elon Musk … the interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”

Merz’s conservatism may be what allows him to shepherd Europe through a historic transformation. Just as the anti-communist hard-liner Richard Nixon was uniquely situated to establish American relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, and just as the left-wing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was best placed to cut back Germany’s welfare state in the 2000s, Merz, with his stodgy, center-right credentials and postwar pedigree, may be just the leader to get Germans and Europeans to spend big for their emancipation from the United States.

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Many of Sunday's front pages are dominated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to No 10.

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