Bewildering’: US media and politicians react to Trump’s televised attack on Zelenskyy

One television star turned president visits another far more powerful one on a stage set and attempts to introduce a plot twist of sorts. What could go wrong?

The high-stakes White House showdown that unfolded on Friday after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded US security guarantees was deemed a damaging setback to Donald Trump’s goal of forging a peace deal – and a win for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – by some US political commentators.

And others in the US who are closely aligned with Trump cast the president’s meeting with Zelenskyy as a win for his “America first” realignment goals.

“It is bewildering to see Mr Trump’s allies defending this debacle as some show of American strength,” the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial board said on Saturday, noting that US aims of limiting Russian expansionism without the use of US forces was now “harder to achieve”.

The outlet warned that “turning Ukraine over to Mr Putin would be catastrophic for that country and Europe, but it would be a political calamity for Mr Trump too.

“Friday’s spectacle won’t make [Putin] any more willing to stop his onslaught” after invading Ukraine in 2022.

The New York Times assessed that the derailed Oval Office meeting pointed to Trump’s “determination to scrap America’s traditional sources of power – its alliances among like-minded democracies – and return the country to an era of raw great-power negotiations.”

“The three-year wartime partnership between Washington and Kyiv was shattered,” the paper added.

Some conservative political figures also hit out at their fellow Republicans Trump and Vance for their handling over the meeting. “I hate to say this … but the United States right now is not the good guys in this,” said Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois who once served on a House committee that investigated Trump supporters’ attack on the US Capitol in early 2021.

Whether diplomatic relations between Ukraine and the US can be repaired remained an open question Saturday. But the dispute points to the dangers of conducting diplomacy in public, despite the assessment from Trump – a former reality-TV host – that the clash with his Ukrainian counterpart, an ex-actor, made “great television”.

“It is going to be incredibly hard to walk back from the kind of animosity we saw in that room today and to walk back some of those statements,” Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News. “It could have been done if cameras had not been running, but the only winner out of today is Vladimir Putin.”

The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, revealed after the showdown that his meeting with Zelenskyy in Kviv days earlier resulted in a heated exchange, too. After Friday’s meltdown, Bessent called Zelenskyy’s approach “one of the great diplomatic own goals in history”.

“Clearly it very difficult to do an economic deal with a leader that doesn’t want to do a peace deal,” Bessent told Bloomberg.

“I’m not sure what he was thinking,” Bessent said of Zelenskyy, who was ultimately asked to leave the White House by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after Ukrainian diplomatic aides texted that they were prepared to sign the agreed economic rare earth minerals deal.

The White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, called out what he termed Zelenskyy’s “impertinence” and described the showdown as “one of the great moments in the history of American diplomacy”.

“Millions of American hearts swelled with overflowing pride today to watch President Trump put Zelenskyy in his place,” Miller said, without elaborating on what public opinion information he had to justify that belief.

Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal wrote: “For a former comedian used to the cameras, it was strange that Zelensky got the script wrong.” Agawal noted that Trump had been testing the boundaries of press attention all week with “freewheeling” discussions in front of the world’s cameras.

Such commentary came as Fox News host Bret Baier asked Zelenskyy whether he wanted to apologize to Trump, to which the Ukraine president said: “I’m not sure we did something bad.”

“I respect [the] president and I respect [the] American people, and … I think that we have to be very open and very honest,” Zelenskyy told Baier.

But arriving in London on Saturday ahead of a summit of British and European leaders, Zelenskyy thanked the US and its leadership while voicing hope for strong relations. “We want only strong relations with America, and I really hope we will have them,” he said.

European leaders have stood behind Zelenskyy, with the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, saying he “would never have believed that we would one day have to protect Ukraine from the USA”.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said if someone is gambling with the third world war – as Trump accused Zelenskyy of doing on Friday – it was not Zelenskyy.

“If anyone is gambling with World War III, his name is Vladimir Putin,” said Macron, after Trump complained that Zelenskyy had been overly negative about the Russian dictator.