Cards and Courage
As a candidate, Donald Trump often wondered aloud, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”—longing for a ruthless enforcer like the belligerent attorney who reigned as Senator Joe McCarthy’s attack dog. But in his recent Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Trump instead encountered the powerful shadow of Joseph Welch.
By having the courage to speak truth to power in 1954, Welch upended McCarthy’s witch hunt. His famous comment at a Senate hearing was the beginning of the end for McCarthy: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
Zelenskyy didn’t ask Trump if he had a sense of decency. But if you read the transcript and/or watched the full 50-minute video of their meeting, Trump answered that question anyway—and the answer was clearly no.
A Staged Performance
In retrospect, the meeting felt designed to force the Ukrainian president into a role of submissive gratitude. It began with a strange, insulting remark about Zelenskyy’s suit—an opening gambit to establish dominance. Trump later revisited with a patronizing follow-up: “And I do like your clothing, by the way.”
Respect was set early as the through line—or, rather, the demand for respect. Trump had already planted the seed for how he intended to treat Zelenskyy, telling reporters the week before: “I hear that he’s coming on Friday. Certainly, it’s okay with me if he’d like to.”
Translation: He can ask me for help.
Vice President JD Vance made the expectation explicit, interrupting Zelenskyy to scold him:
“Mr. President, with respect, I think it's disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”
Trump echoed the message: “You have to be thankful. You don’t have the cards.”
Again and again, Trump made it clear:
“Obama gave sheets and Trump gave Javelins. You’ve got to be more thankful because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards.”
Finally, clearly feeling that Zelenskyy had not sufficiently bowed down, Trump took credit for Zelenskyy’s tenacious leadership as well:
“The problem is I've empowered you to be a tough guy, and I don't think you'd be a tough guy without the United States.”
Even for Trump, that’s quite an insult to hurl at a wartime president, living every hour for over 1,000 days under the very real threat of being killed by an assassin or a spy, a North Korean soldier or Iranian drone, a ballistic or hypersonic missile—or any of 100 other ways Russians have dispatched people perceived as, in Stalin’s words, an “enemy of the people.”
The "Deal"
What was the purpose of this performance? What exactly was the deal Trump kept referencing?
Reuters apparently saw an actual document, dated February 25: “Bilateral Agreement Establishing Terms And Conditions For A Reconstruction Investment Fund”. The title, text, and anticipated signatories of the 11-point document tell the story of what it is and is not.
Not a peace treaty. Not a security guarantee. Instead, a nebulous, yet-to-be-determined financial arrangement, not even overseen by the State Department, but by the Treasury Secretary.
Although mentioned 40 times during the meeting, it’s not clear what the “deal” is or where things stand. Sometimes we have a deal, sometimes we’re working on it, and sometimes we even have two deals.
Trump’s own language revealed the instability of this so-called deal:
“We have to negotiate a deal. But we've started the confines of a deal… And I think something can happen.”
“We're going to sign the agreement at the conference in the East Room in a little while, right after lunch.”
“And when the deal is made, we talk about security. Everyone's talking about the other day, all they talked about was security. I said, let me make the deal first. I have to make the deal first.”
Zelenskyy made it clear before the meeting that “security guarantees” were non-negotiable. He also knew Trump was living in a “disinformation bubble.” When push came to shove, Zelenskyy held his ground on security despite the insults, patronizing tone, and outright lies.
He wasn’t about to get steamrolled into buying Trump’s fantasy that Russian President Vladimir Putin would honor agreements just because Trump sees himself as the ultimate dealmaker.
The Art of the Squeeze
From the beginning, the welcoming ceremony was just a show—an international version of the near-daily signing ceremonies that allow Trump to remind everyone who has the power.
It was part of an isolated American campaign to put the squeeze on an ally in the midst of a war in Europe, an ally fighting to push back exactly what the United States has been trying to deter in Europe for decades, at enormous cost—naked Soviet, now Russian, aggression against democracies in Europe.
In essence, it was extortion.
Trump knew he could call Putin privately at any time. He knew that Zelenskyy couldn’t refuse an opportunity to meet with the U.S. president—even after being excluded from discussions about his own country’s future.
Trump and Putin had likely already agreed on their terms for the future of Ukraine (without Ukraine’s involvement). Trump has made it quite clear that he trusts Putin more than U.S. intelligence services.
Zelenskyy was sandbagged into believing the meeting was between allies—and that perhaps Trump could be trusted a bit more than Putin—but Trump himself made clear the duplicity that has characterized his entire career.
Trump drove his position home:
“I don't want to talk about security yet because I want to get the deal done. You fall into the same trap as everybody else, a million times. You say it over and over. I want to get the deal done. Security is so easy. That's about 2% of the problem. I'm not worried about security. I'm worried about getting the deal done. The security is the easy part.”
A wartime leader was expected to stand down. But he didn’t. And that, in Trump’s world, is an unforgivable offense.
The Donald
By standing up to the bullying, Zelenskyy broke the first rule of the Trump playbook: Never refuse to bow to The Donald. But Zelenskyy wasn’t interested in playing the meek supplicant. He knew what his country needed and wasn’t trading that for a pat on the head.
If courage means standing firm against abuse of power, then Zelenskyy has it in spades. He defended Ukraine’s interests despite the verbal assault from American leadership. His gratitude for U.S. support was genuine, but nothing he said would be enough for Trump and team.
Vance was clearly waiting to pounce on Zelenskyy. But when the Ukrainian president stayed composed, Vance fumbled. His attempt to sound informed only exposed how disconnected he was.
When Zelenskyy invited Vance to “come just once” to Ukraine, Vance awkwardly claimed he’d only “actually watched and seen the stories.” Ukrainians don’t have the luxury of just “watching.” They’ve lived for centuries as a target of Russian ambition.
Generations of Ukrainians have watched Russian tsars and Communist party leaders salivate over a warm-water port in the Black Sea—with Ukraine seen as an obstacle to this existential need. That’s why Russia seized Sevastopol during its first invasion of Ukraine nearly 11 years ago. Ukrainians know exactly what’s at stake, and Zelenskyy wasn’t going to let anyone forget it.
Business Commitments
This battle over power and commitment isn’t playing out only in geopolitics. Where business intersects with political issues, such as climate change and diversity, commitments made, trusted, and perceived as deep and solid are now aging poorly—raising doubts and, in many cases, evaporating with almost no warning.
Under the Obama and Biden administrations, corporations made ambitious climate and social commitments, backed by political and financial incentives. But now, under Trump, companies are backtracking.
Amazon is quietly walking away from its pledge to run data centers on 100% renewable energy.
Executives at Meta—owners of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—are groveling dutifully to show corporate loyalty to Trump.
Forbes recently listed major corporations cutting DEI programs, including but certainly not limited to Bank of America, BlackRock, Boeing, Deere, Goldman, Harley-Davidson, Lowe's, McDonald's, Molson Coors, Paramount, Pepsi, State Street, Target, and Vanguard.
Yet some companies are showing real courage. Cisco, Coca-Cola, Costco, Delta, and Deutsche Bank remain committed to diversity and equity. As pressure mounts, however, these commitments will be put to the test—as we are all being tested right now.
Whether corporate leaders or presidents, congresspeople or local officials, whether truck drivers or farmers or lawyers or teachers; for all of us, this is a crossroads.
What’s at Stake
This isn’t just about Ukraine or corporate loyalty. It’s about truth itself. As the saying goes, history is written by the victors, and this is a battle we cannot afford to lose.
Rewriting history is a tactic familiar to former Soviet citizens. In 1988, when I was running my company in Moscow, The Los Angeles Timesreport captured a seismic event: “All final history exams for Soviet schoolchildren have been canceled… because the government concluded that much of what they were taught was wrong.”
Decades of institutional lying came crashing down as the truth emerged. And this is the underlying battle.
It’s not about the budget, taxes, or a temporary rollback of rights and freedoms that Americans—and now Ukrainians—have lost their lives to preserve.
There is even more at stake. Much more.
When hypocrisy and deceit become acceptable tools, even switching sides in the middle of a war can be spun as shrewd or heroic. The recent meeting served as a stage for Trump to shift responsibility from Putin to Zelenskyy, depicting him as the one who doesn’t want peace.
This, of course, fits neatly into Trump’s ongoing effort to rewrite history to suit his false narrative of how this war began.
Trump isn’t just pushing an agenda. He’s creating a parallel universe—a world where facts don’t matter and submission is the currency that counts.
The Choice We Face
Zelenskyy stood firm and refused to play the role of a supplicant. But this fight isn’t his alone. We are all in this fight, whether we want to be or not.
If courage means standing firm in the face of an abuse of power and refusing to be intimidated while negotiating strategically, then we are all going to be challenged to stand together in this precarious moment. Trump can brag during a meeting that he, “stopped wars that nobody ever heard about. I stopped wars before they ever started.”
But there’s a war happening right now, one that Trump himself ignited—a war against facts and reality.
It will take millions of courageous people to pierce Trump’s “disinformation bubble.”
And we need to pick up the pace. We are already late. There is no time to lose.
