Trump attacks Ukraine: The new Mar-a-Lie-go
Oh dear. Trump’s gone rogue. Again.
I doubt even The Simpsons predicted such a seismic shift in US foreign policy. President Donald Trump has sent the world into a frenzy, claiming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a ‘dictator’, only has a ‘4% approval rating’, and ‘should never have started’ the Russia-Ukraine War.
Before fact-checking these claims, a word of warning to Donald Trump – who, with such remarks, seems to be cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Don’t throw stones in glass houses.
In 2021, Putin passed a law that could keep him in office until 2036. Putin allegedly (almost definitely) rigged the 2024 Russian election, winning over 87% of the vote. When Alexei Navalny built momentum against Putin’s corruptive governance, he was imprisoned and died in February 2024. Calling Zelensky a dictator when Putin has this sort of warped record is frankly laughable.
But that’s the power of disinformation. Trump has built a career on lying to people who believe the person shouting the loudest. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: twitter (alright, X) is one of the most dangerous political weapons in history. It only lets you hear what you want to hear. Algorithmic echo chambers are rallying armies of chronically ill-informed people who treat what they read on X as gospel.
Who are you supposed to believe? It’s like a constant conspiracy theory against the establishment – except, now, conspiracists like Trump are making up ‘facts’ as evidence for their claims. How on God’s good green earth have we arrived at a point where those deliberately and knowingly spreading disinformation are not called out?
With that in mind, what of Trump’s claims against Zelensky?
Zelensky is a ‘dictator’
I was going to say this is the most ridiculous claim of the lot. But I’ve changed my mind – they’re all equally barking mad. Zelensky won 73% of the vote in the 2019 presidential election, which was deemed “competitive” by independent observers at the OSCE.
Similarly, what was Trump smoking when he challenged Zelensky’s legitimacy for not holding an election after five years? Well before that point, Ukraine was under martial law – a military government – thanks to Putin’s illegal invasion. Not only would it be unconstitutional to hold an election when your country is at war, but when family members are at risk of death every second of every day fighting on the frontline, the last thing Ukrainian households would want to see pop through their letterbox is a ballot paper. More to the point, 6.8 million people have fled the country, so there’s nobody left to vote anyway.
Zelensky’s ‘down at 4% approval rating’
Uncharacteristically, this is quite a clever claim because who knows what the true figure is. Millions of people have fled Ukraine, and those who remain are hardly in the mood to pick up the telephone to polling companies asking if they still support their president.
What we do know is Zelensky was soaring on a 90% approval rating in May 2022 and 77% in 2023 – so to drop to as little as 4% seems almost impossible. Having said that, nobody is going to be particularly chuffed with their leader after spending three years at war with the Russian bear.
This is what’s so dangerous about Trump. I suspect he arrived at the figure of 4% by licking his finger, seeing which way the wind blows, calculating the square root of his age and dividing it by two, before saying ‘that’ll do’. And yet, there’s no real evidence to prove him right or wrong. So all the Trump die-hards rant and rave about 4% this, 4% that, while everyone else is sat chewing the end of their pencils trying to rationalise the impossible. It’s total madness.
Zelensky ‘should never have started’ the Russia-Ukraine war
Upon reflection, this is probably the worst claim of the lot. Ukraine did not start the war. Russia announced a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. That’s as clear as day.
The bigger question here is whether Zelensky could have negotiated a deal to end the war instead of prolonging it by fighting.
But what exactly does Trump think Zelensky should’ve done? Shook hands with Putin to hand over Donetsk and Luhansk to Russia? Condemning the millions of Ukrainians living in those regions to becoming Russian citizens? That would be like choosing which body part you’re going to give away. And this is Vladimir Putin, don’t forget. So if you surrendered as much as a chest hair, he’d come back for the rest at some point.
The final verdict
Donald Trump is either playing a Tommy Shelby, befriending Putin only to take him down from the inside in a classic Peaky Blinders plot, or he’s lying straight to our faces, or genuinely thinks Zelensky is an illegitimate leader. Unfortunately, I think the greatest likelihood lies with the last one.
Whatever it is and whatever the explanation, the most powerful man on the planet is seemingly snuggling up to Vladimir Putin in a Russian blizzard against Ukraine. That’s bad news for anyone anywhere in the world – let alone those still stuck in Ukraine.
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