Conservative analyst Jonah Goldberg is fed up with everything in foreign policy and politics having to accommodate President Donald Trump's visceral impulses — and he laid out his frustration in a new analysis for The Dispatch following Trump's ambush shouting match with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday.
"I went and watched the entire 50-minute question-and-answer session on C-SPAN (which you can do right here), not just the few minutes in which things got heated. I highly recommend watching the whole thing, as excruciating as it is," wrote Goldberg. "I am trying to get my head around what we saw. And when I say 'we,' I don’t mean you and me, but the world. I found it appalling and embarrassing for the country. Everyone is going to their predictable sides. Including me. I put the blame for this on Trump and J.D. Vance. When I say 'this,' I mean the broader shame and dishonor Trump has brought to the issue of the Russian invasion of Ukraine."
It's possible that Zelensky didn't handle the situation perfectly, wrote Goldberg — but any discussion of that wholly misses the elephant in the room.
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"Zelensky shouldn’t have taken the bait," he wrote. "But Vance, the champion of diplomacy, shouldn’t have baited a war-weary man fighting for the survival of his country in the first place. If he wanted a deal, his job should have been to prevent Trump from being goaded, not to goad Trump. He should have been the one to nudge Trump to call an end to the presser. That’s what Mike Pence would have done. But Vance has his own agenda, and he poorly served his president in service to it. What is his agenda? To be America’s foremost troll."
Moreover, Goldberg wrote of his conservative peers like Rich Lowry and Marc Thiessen who have a dimmer view of Zelensky's handling of the situation, "even if you think Zelensky made a fatal error by actually telling the truth about the predicament his nation finds itself in, even if you think the mineral deal — with no security guarantees — is brilliant, the fact remains that the administration mishandled the situation. Remember, Zelensky is a politician too. And for the better part of an hour he was asked to sit there as Trump painted a false moral equivalence between Russia and Ukraine and was dismissive of Ukraine’s plight and the history that led to this. If you actually want a deal, maybe don’t do that in public? I mean, the Ukrainians are watching too."
"Lowry says that Zelensky 'made an excellent point, but he wasn’t there to be right or to win an argument.' Fair enough," wrote Goldberg. "But this is yet another situation where others are to blame for not fully adjusting to the fact that Trump is a thin-skinned, malicious toddler with poor impulse control. It’s always someone else’s fault for not enabling or humoring him sufficiently. You know who knows Trump is easily baited into childish outbursts? J.D. Vance. And either out of cynicism or petulant incompetence, he acted on that."