‘I Think That This Was Staged’: White House Attack on Zelenskyy Called No Accident
Trump, Vance ambush Ukrainian leader in shocking meeting
The meeting that saw Donald Trump and his vice president blow up at the leader of Ukraine in an unprecedented public meltdown at the White House was no accident or miscalculation.
Rather, the shocking turn of events had been planned from the beginning.
That’s according to some journalists and national security experts.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Washington DC for a meeting at the White House regarding the ongoing brutal Russian invasion of his country.
But instead of the warm embrace and show of support that he would get from former President Joe Biden, Zelenskyy had to sit in front of television cameras while Trump and JD Vance took turns denigrating and belittling him — before Trump had Zelenskyy thrown out of the White House altogether.
But an unprecedented breach of decorum and diplomacy wasn’t just a mishap. Rather, the display of rancor and vitriol was the intent of Trump and Vance going in, according to some who saw the event.
“I think there’s no question that this was a setup. You heard Donald Trump say at the end of that clip you played, ‘This is great television.’ This was a setup,” said Susan Rice, an advisor to Biden and a White House national security adviser to President Barack Obama. “Volodymyr Zelenskyy was compelled to agree to a horrible deal that would have sent Ukraine’s minerals to the United States without any concrete security guarantees. And yet, because he was trying to improve a relationship with Donald Trump, he came to Washington, he came to the Oval Office and sat down for a meeting hat-in-hand.
“Soon after he got there, the vice president of the United States lit into him and started a confrontation,” Rice added. “Now, I’ve been in countless Oval Office meetings with heads of state, presidents and vice presidents, as national security adviser, as UN ambassador, and in other roles. I can tell you that the vice president or the secretary of state or anybody else, they don’t jump in, hijack a conversation without the express blessing of the president of the United States.
“So, J.D. Vance did that deliberately. Donald Trump knew what he was going to do. And I think, as he said at the end, because he can’t help himself, this was a setup for the cameras,” she said. “It was a play to his base, but above all, it was a play to [Russian leader] Vladimir Putin to show fealty to Vladimir Putin and to try to humiliate Zelenskyy.”
Longtime TV journalist Gretchen Carlson also believes that it was “completely planned” from the start.
“I mean, even Trump said, ‘This was great TV,’ and it‘s sort of like he let the cat out of the bag,” she said. “I think that this was staged, planned because Trump and Vance know they‘re playing to the American public more than anything else.
“And if you go on any social media, you‘re seeing people say, ‘Yay, we got America back again. Make America great again.’ And I was asking, ‘How does this make America great again?’”
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