There is a moment from the NATO summit in Ankara this week that historians will fight over, and it isn’t the communiqué.
Donald Trump, sitting next to Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO summit, mused aloud that Putin wanted to hold peace talks in Moscow. Then he turned to the president of Ukraine, a man whose country has been bled white by Russian missiles striking civilian targets for four and a half years, and asked him if he’d go.
Zelenskyy, a comedian by trade and a brilliant wartime leader by necessity, didn’t blink. “It’s difficult,” he said. “There are a lot of Ukrainian drones there.” His comic and political timing was perfection.
The room exploded. Reporters laughed. Zelenskyy landed the cleanest kill shot of the summit without raising his voice, and Trump sat there slackly grinning like a man who wasn’t entirely of the punchline.
He was the punchline.
The President of the United States, the commander of the most powerful military in human history, got worked by a former sitcom actor in front of the world press, and the actor did it politely, with a smile, the way you handle a relative who can’t be trusted with the car keys anymore.
It was a perfect inversion of the silly Oval Office setup where Trump and his meat puppet J.D. (If that’s his real name) Vance attacked Ukraine on Putin’s behalf, and with even Slow Donnie figuring out that the war Russia thought it would fight isn’t the war it’s fighting now: meatwaves of untrained peasant soldiers are being slaughtered wholesale by cheap drones and battlefield robots. Ukraine can target and destroy strategic targets (energy targets, lately) almost anywhere in Russia.
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