Where did it all go wrong between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky? Just a week ago, Zelensky was speaking of his ‘respect’ and ‘friendship’ for Trump and of his hope that the new US administration would ‘stand by Ukraine … to make a just and lasting peace’. Yet in the course of just 24 hours, the Trump-Zelensky relationship spiralled into a nose-dive before definitively crashing and burning with a devastatingly vicious post by the US President on his Truth Social media platform.
In an incoherent and error-filled statement, Trump blasted Zelensky as ‘a dictator without elections’, a ‘modestly successful comedian’ who had ‘talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion dollars, to go into a war that couldn’t be won, that never had to start’. Trump accused Zelensky of ‘playing Biden like a fiddle’ in order to extract money – and, perhaps most outrageously of all, accused Zelensky of putting off peace talks with Putin because he ‘probably wants to keep the gravy train going’.
Trump’s savage attack on a close American ally has no precedent in the modern history
Trump’s ally Elon Musk was quick to pile in behind the President’s criticisms of Zelensky’s legitimacy.
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