Why there’s no justification for Trump’s toxic approach to Ukraine war

Following the tumultuous clash between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House Oval Office last Friday, there was little doubt that something fundamental in the world order had changed.

Reactions to the jaw-dropping encounter were varied, and unsurprisingly it was quite hard to separate ideological commentaries from political ones, such is the degree of social polarisation that the arrival of Donald Trump has enflamed. To make matters worse this new US presidency has also effectively reduced the business of politics to a cult of personalities and is increasingly replacing diplomacy and meaningful dialogue with the rationale of popular rhetoric.

This unquestionably suits Donald Trump, whose background is of course commerce and the media, but it’s certainly not a theatre of negotiation that many other political leaders are comfortable with. For several generations now the format for political negotiations and other interactions between nations has been that its public face is one of smiles and handshakes for the camera, with the unpleasantness and grubby business of resolving differences confined to private quarters.

Friday’s verbal explosion will no doubt go down as one of history’s turning points, and dissertations will undoubtedly be crafted on questions about who was right or wrong at that particular moment. The full record of the exchange, and of the day generally – rather than just the segments the media highlighted – reveal that things had already plummeted well before the parties took to the famous Oval Office chairs. As he stepped out of his vehicle there was the expected smiles and handshakes, but the US President just couldn’t resist taking a swipe at Mr Zelenskyy’s outfit.

“You’re all dressed up today,” Mr Trump quipped sarcastically, referring to Zelensky’s military-style black sweatshirt, adorned with the Ukrainian trident. It was a swipe that took on catastrophic consequences when later during the White House meeting one of the attending journalists took up the same retort.

“Why don’t you wear a suit?” the journalist asked Mr Zelenskyy. “You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit.”

Of course this was no random journalist asking such an inflammatory question, but Brian Glenn, chief White House correspondent for conservative cable network Real America’s Voice.

“Do you own a suit?” Glenn continued to a stunned world. “A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the dignity of this office.”

For Zelenskyy, who has eschewed suits and ties and donned military-style clothing since the start of the Ukraine war as a gesture of solidarity with those fighting, it was one insult too far, and there was just no way the meeting was going to improve from that point on.

Ironically, if distain for Trump is one thing, admiration for Zelenskyy is also not a given – whilst for some he’s the heroic champion of a beleaguered nation and perhaps even the last heroic knight of Western democracy, to others he’s a dangerous dictator who as Trump warned is “playing card with World War Three.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, before anyone’s had time to decide whether it’s Trump or Zelenskyy who’s heading the world towards annihilation, our own prime Minister has jumped into the ring with his own particular version of annihilation diplomacy.

Given that the Ukrainian president was ejected unceremoniously from the White House with no peace deal on the table, there really was little option for European leaders but to gather round the bonfire ashes and see what if anything could be salvaged from this unprecedented diplomatic calamity. ‘Between a rock and hard place’ was never more apposite – in parliament yesterday afternoon Mr Starmer had to cut a very tricky line between throwing his unreserved support behind Ukraine, and his otherwise lukewarm interest in increasing the UK’s military and fiscal support for the grinding stalemate of a war.

At this early stage in the process, a call for rationality, calmness and a call for everyone to return to the table – along with a lot of backroom effort – would have sufficed, but Mr Starmer somehow felt obliged to go all Churchillian and talk about the UK “leading from the front” and “putting boots on the ground and planes in the air” – seemingly to give further assistance to the peace process.

Unfortunately, this kind of daft rhetoric has very little to do with Winston Churchill, who would undoubtedly have been horrified with the developments of the past few days, and the association of him with these unwise rituals. It was noticeable that during the Trump/Zelenskyy spat there was a conspicuously empty chair placed directly behind the US president and right above it was a bust of Churchill, as if the British wartime leader’s presence was somehow being invisibly invoked by the US administration.

Given the ‘disrespectful lack of a suit’ issue, this was a tad ironic as Churchill himself was renowned for attending major international meetings in military-style clothes during the Second World War. His iconic all-in-one boiler suit may have been a rather expensive romper suit made by London-based shirtmaker Turnbull & Asser but – like Zelenskyy’s sweatshirt – the outfit nonetheless symbolised Churchill’s desire to recognise and acknowledge the heroic efforts of the countless people involved in the war effort.

Our Winston would also have been mortified by the spectacle of two world leaders knocking lumps out of each other and demolishing solidarity before the world’s media in the face of a deadly prowling enemy.

In one respect, however, there are valid analogies between Churchill’s approach to diplomacy and peace-making, and those of President Zelenskyy. At the epicentre of the Trump administration, and indeed Donald Trump’s entire career, has been a particularly unpleasant brand of toxic masculinity that discourages empathy and encourages strength through dominance and displays of personal power. In this domain, any evidence of ‘feminine’ characteristics and behaviours are a sign of weakness, and in this context whatever the political outlook and actions of the Ukrainian president – there is much about the persona, approach and personality of President Zelenskyy that is the absolute antithesis of Trump’s MAGA vision of a balanced society.

In such an atmosphere of mutual antagonism it’s going to be very hard for either party to get past their personal perceptions of the other and start negotiating meaningfully.

In this context it’s curious to ponder on what might have happened if Donald Trump had ever clashed with Winston Churchill over the negotiating table. One suspects we’d never have organised the D-Day landings, which goes a long way to revealing how not only the world has changed in the past century, but how human nature and our communal behaviour has changed too – and most of it for the worst.

Listening to the early observations and remarks coming out of today’s summit of European leaders held in London, one can only express bemusement. For instance, what exactly does our PM mean when he says that Europe is going to “proceed with strength” and will do “the heavy lifting” in securing peace but can’t do it without “strong US backing”?

Most of us these days have the strong suspicion that global conflicts are not primarily driven by profound ideological differences, but by profit and commerce. Much as we’ve seen in Gaza, developed western economies all too often parachute into disputes with offers to supply arms and weaponry (sometimes even to both sides), and then – when the landscape and its population has been all but obliterated – those very same nations sweep in as peacemakers and economy rebuilders to profit a second time from the misery they have promulgated. Case in point, could there be anything more perverse than the relentless US flow of arms and munitions to Israel, aligned to Donald Trump’s subsequent promise to turn the wasteland that their weapons have created into the new “Riviera of the Middle East”?

As Donald Trump observed during the Zelenskyy interview, his misplaced masculine posturing and takedown made “for great television” but sooner rather than later someone will be pointing out to Mr Trump that a very significant amount of his domestic income derives from the sale and export of arms, so cutting back support for Ukraine may be a popular political message, but sadly it doesn’t make a lot of economic sense. That may not be anything like as important as preventing world war three, but it’s likely the only reasoning that Mr Trump will ever listen to.

One might also hope that he and other world leaders – including Mr Putin – might realise that war is never an answer to differences, and that propping up your economy with arms manufacturing is morally questionable, if not completely indefensible. Sadly, until that reality is confronted in this world, people will continue to die horribly in very large numbers, for no good reason at all.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and public theologian