Trump’s ambush of Zelensky

Like big game hunters, President Trump, assisted by his vice president, JD Vance, waited for the prey in their lair — the Oval Office — and then let loose with shots heard around the world.

Their target, Ukraine President, Volodymry Zelensky, survived but the direct and collateral damage will be felt around the entire world.

There is much debate whether Trump-Vance planned the attack or whether it was spontaneous. The ultimate question: Does it really matter when the results are the same?

Some evidence suggests that Trump with his “lap dog” Vance, intended to blindside Zelensky. Just take the word of South Carolina Senator Lindsey O. Graham.

Publicly — yes, publicly — Graham said he warned Zelensky not “to take the bait,” implying he knew, if not all of the plan, at least part of it.

Yet, after the Trump-Vance verbal onslaught, Graham, praised Trump, saying he has “never been more proud of our president.”

That assessment came after Zelensky, before meeting Trump, was embraced warmly in Congress by not just Democrats, but Republicans as well.

But it took only minutes — literally minutes — for the GOP grovelers to come to Trump’s defense.

Of course, we have seen this kind of behavior from GOP officeholders for almost a decade — Vance called Trump a Hitler as well as an idiot and Lindsey once advised the president to “go to Hell” and labeled him a racist. Graham also broke with the GOP saying Joe Biden won the 2020 election and that Biden was the “best person” to unify the country after January 6.

That’s not all. Let’s remember the harshest criticism of Trump came from Republicans — not Democrats — including, former Vice President Mike Pence; Texas Senator Ted Cruz; former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley; former Secretary State Rex Tillerson; former Texas Governor Rick Perry; Utah Senator Mike Lee; and former South Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, now serving as Trump’s secretary of interior. And then there is former advisor, Steve Bannon, who called Trump a Hitler but he meant it as a compliment.

The unbelievable and condemnable lack of character makes the following observation of Republican President Ronald Reagan especially apt: Politics, he said, “is said to be the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”

We also should not judge the explosive confrontation in the Oval Office in a vacuum. It came after Trump lied about Ukraine starting the war, and Vance lecturing Europe but not mentioning Russia’s President Vladimir Putin launching the unprovoked war. Trump also called Zelensky, the leader of a democracy, a dictator and the US voted against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s aggression.

Analysts around the world will examine Trump’s motivations, along with their ramifications. I hope the experts conduct a careful political autopsy and not ignore Trump’s long business interests in Russia and with Russian oligarchs.

In a previous column, I wrote that Trump, who salivates “retribution,” probably still holds a grudge against Zelensky because he refused Trump’s request that the Ukrainian president announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.  That “request” was the root cause of Trump’s first impeachment. Surely, Zelensky’s refusal still keeps Trump up at night. He has been waiting for revenge, believing he would never get the chance after his election loss in 2020.

Regarding business ties with Russia, numerous sources have pointed out for many years that Trump was almost completely broken as a businessman in the early 1992 and was saved by money from wealthy people in Russia and former Soviet republics.

Trump has always denied being the recipient of any financial help from Russian sources. He once tweeted: “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA-NO DEALS, NO LOANS NO NOTHING.”

Yet, his son, Donald Jr., in 2008, speaking at a New York real estate conference, said that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. Say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Michael Hirsh, writing in Foreign Policy in 2018, quotes Alan Lapidus, Trump’s former longtime architect, as saying: “He [Trump] could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”

Numerous news organizations have traced Trump’s business initiatives with Russia dating back to the mid-1980s. These include: Reuters, Business Insider, Politico, USA Today, and Financial Times among others.

New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman, writing on Russian interference in the 2016 election, said, “President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russia campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.” Friedman went on:

“My guess is what Trump is hiding has to do with money. It’s something about his financial ties to business elites tied to the Kremlin. They may own a big stake in him.”

Those ties could still be hanging over his head. He possibly wanted to enact his Russian policy in the first term but failed because he had appointed officials to his administration who served as a guardrail and would not do his bidding by violating the Constitution or engaging in unethical, immoral and/or illegal behavior. (Think: Tillerson, Kelly, Mattis, McMaster, and a few others). Moreover, they would not participate in undermining valuable US allies.

But this time, the guardrails are gone. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a stanch supporter of Ukraine, demanded Zelensky apologize.) Trump can now run the government as he did the Trump Organization.

Finally, we cannot overlook that the mineral agreement which was to be signed, was nothing but blackmail. Trump: You give us mineral rights or else…He even refused to give Ukraine security guarantees.

How all this will play out, no one can predict. The wounds are raw, deep and subject to infection.

What’s more, it is almost impossible to retain any hope when Trump has the title of “leader of the free world.”