A Diplomatic Disaster

The scene at the White House this morning was the most outrageous, distressing and depressing political appearance I have seen in my 40 years as a reporter. It’s difficult to imagine how families in Ukraine viewed this diplomatic disaster after the last three years of losing loved ones, losing their homes, being up all night from air-raid sirens and now watching hopes of a cease-fire agreement possibly vanishing before their eyes.

Here’s what happened: President Trump and Vice President JD Vance hosted Ukrainian President Zelensky to the Oval Office where they quickly began loudly berating and bullying the leader of a country who three years ago surprised the world by having the courage and gumption to stand up to an unprovoked invasion by Russia, and who since that moment has been fighting for his country’s existence.?

Trump sided with the aggressor, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a stance he has consistently made clear all of this week as part of an outrageous turning of the tables on American diplomacy. Vance seemed almost gleeful in his willingness to pile on against Zelensky. We are now in uncharted waters.

The explosive televised shouting match was unlike any seen in the Oval Office between an American president and foreign leader in modern times. After the altercation, the popularly-elected Zelensky and his diplomatic entourage was essentially thrown out of the White House over their protests and ushered out right past a dining room set for lunch.?

Trump and Vance accused Zelensky of being disrespectful and castigated him for not being grateful enough for U.S. support in its war with Russia. They seemed to be carrying out a planned ambush to publicly strong-arm him into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictate. With voices raised and tempers flaring,? Trump issued a threat in no uncertain terms to abandon Ukraine altogether if Zelensky did not go along.

What was immediately clear was that Russia seemed quite pleased.

Russian state media savored what it termed a public “dressing down” for Zelensky. \ A TV host on the Rossiya 24 channel, said on its evening show that the Oval Office meeting “looks more like a public flagellation for Zelensky” and something that “no one expected from the U.S. president,” according to the New York Times live updates.

This will be remembered as a fateful day at the end of fateful week. It began on Monday when European leaders gathered in Kyiv with Zelensky to mark the third anniversary of the start of the war. It was painfully noticeable that the U.S. did not send a senior delegation to the gathering.?

On that same day, the U.S. sided with Russia against a UN resolution calling for an end of Russian aggression against Ukraine. Looking at the other “distinguished” countries that the U.S. found itself aligned with in this resolution, the likes of Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Sudan and Nicaragua, forces us to embrace just how stark is the change of U.S. foreign policy since the inauguration of Donald Trump.

It seems these measures were part of an effort to force Ukraine into signing an agreement to give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare minerals deposits, which for the moment, doesn’t include any security assurances for Ukraine. Zelensky was expected to sign the agreement today, which falls short of the $500 billion “payback” Trump wanted from Ukraine for the U.S. support. But were part of an effort to say the terms of US support to Ukraine were going to come with a price going forward.?

That deal went up in smoke yesterday. Few see any chance of it being reconstituted at this point.

During his campaign, Trump made no secret about his desire to change the terms of the U.S. support of Ukraine, boasting about his relationship with Putin and saying he would “end the war quickly.” In the weeks after his inauguration he has doubled down on this approach, even calling Zelensky “a dictator,” and echoing Russian propaganda about Ukraine “starting the war.”?

The indisputable historical fact is that Russia started the war when it launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine with a column of tanks and troops on February 24, 2022.?

Marking the escalation of a war which began in 2014 when Putin’s Russian forces invaded and occupied Crimea, the Russian forces pushed forward from the North East and vowed to capture the capital of Kyiv within three days. But Zelensky mustered Ukrainian forces to cobble together a heroic and surprisingly effective defense against the invasion, forcing the Russian troops into retreat by April. Zelensky’s leadership and support of his nation was compared by the world to Britain’s Winston Churchill standing up to Hitler’s aggression

The invasion unleashed a war that is still raging. The largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, it has caused hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties. As of 2025, Russian troops occupy approximately 20 percent of the country. From a population of 41 million, about 8 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II.

So where does this train wreck of a White House visit leave us? Having just marked the third anniversary of the war, it seems we are suddenly in uncharted territory. Zelensky has previously said that he would resign if it was necessary for a process to move forward for peace. It seems there is a stronger likelihood for that to happen after this heated exchange makes it hard to imagine how they could repair the relationship.?

There is one word that comes to mind in trying to find meaning in these last few days as the United States turned against Ukraine: nauseating.

The word has been on my mind this week as I’ve been struggling with a strain of flu that includes the predictable symptoms of cough, sore throat, headache but also nausea, anxiety and shortness of breath.?

This morning I was trying to think how I was going to possibly get it together to sit down and write the newsletter and some procrastination had me looking through bookshelves for inspiration and I landed on an old dog-eared version of Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre. Given my condition, the title caught my eye. I had not read it since college but I leafed through it and was absorbed. Published in 1938, the book is considered Sartre’s best novel and it was written just after the fascist dictator Francisco Franco emerged victorious in the Spanish Civil War and just as Nazi Germany was ramping up its war of aggression across Europe and beyond.

The central character Antoine Roquentin serves as a visceral metaphor for existential disorientation in times of political upheaval. And so nausea’s physicality – dizziness and revulsion – drives home how existential and political disorientation can become intertwined bodily and psychologically. The moment we are all living through these days, the intense stress as we watch the guard rails of our democracy strained and in some places breaking and the realignment of our long-held principles of foreign policy, are not dissimilar from the one that seizes the character Roquentin in Nausea.?

I realized I had been reading the book a bit too long and rushed to watch the live coverage of the Zelensky visit to the White House and the disaster that would soon unfold. By the end of the day, it’s hard to feel like those feelings of nausea, especially dizziness and revulsion, are not just a flu but a global condition in reaction to the caustic politics that caused tectonic plates to shift this afternoon at the White House. Nausea, it seems, is the word of the day.

GroundTruth’s Managing Editor Wilson Liévano contributed to this column