The American side deliberately orchestrated the confrontation during President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the White House, Friedrich Merz, the head of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the likely chancellor, said on March 3.
“It was not a spontaneous reaction to interventions by Zelensky, but obviously a manufactured escalation in this meeting in the Oval Office,” Merz said at a press conference in Hamburg.
The visit was expected to mark the signing of a long-debated agreement between Ukraine and the U.S. on jointly developing Ukraine’s mineral resources.
No shit. They sat him down like a naughty schoolboy and took turns berating him into selling half his country to the yanks for no guarantees on stopping the Russians.
I thought it made Zelenskyy look good.
He was pleading for his people’s protection, while calling the US out on it’s bullshit.
Trump and co just looked like a bunch of dick heads.
Trump is a weak person’s view of a strong person. It only looked good to those weak people.
Daddy issues on a society-wide scale, ffs.
It definitely increased the respect for Zelenskyy across the world.
It was blatantly obvious that it was planned, and good to see people calling it out.
It was my very first thought too. Well, second after what a complete twat JD Vance was. But it just seemed so oddly paced. Like I’ve never seen a conversation go like that it was so strange. It felt really contrived. Course it could be chalked up to insane immaturity too so idk.
I mean Trump’s answer to what if Russia breaks the ceasefire was
What if the bomb drops on your head right now? OK, what if they broke it? I don’t know, they broke it with Biden because Biden, they didn’t respect him. They didn’t respect Obama. They respect me."
So essentially his answer to what happens if they break the ceasefire was… they won’t break it? But no, zelensky is the world’s biggest asshole for wanting to know about securities.
After already being the worlds biggest asshole for not wearing a suit, he may as well ask for securities. For the millionth time. Although that’s only 2% of the deal and he doesn’t have the cards. But he has raw earth. I think I’ve said enough, except thank you.
/s
Watching zelensky die inside while contributing to this shitshow was hard. I can’t imagine how bad that poor guy must have felt. And I’m sure he’s already seen a lot of bad things.
The pain in his expression was the most relatable thing I’ve seen from a world leader possibly ever.
It was like an episode of Veep except more obnoxious.
Vance going on about how the goal is a ceasefire to end the war, Zelensky relying that ceasefires haven’t been followed by Russia, and the Trump.and Vance going off on ‘disrepect’ was just wild. Like reality tv scripted argument level wild. Saturday Night Live parodied the meeting and the parody was toned down compared to the actual meeting!
It felt like Jerry Springer.
His faithful MAGAts are probably waiting for him to tell other elected world leaders that they’re fired. Just because it’ll be funny to hear him say his catchphrase in his weird little voice. And that’s as seriously as they’ll take it until the lights go out and it’s blighted poultry rations for dinner again.
Rotten state of things.
of course they did. did anyone think it was going to go any other way?
Zelensky did great by standing up to them and not reacting to them. the rest of the world saw how weak the current admin is.
how low do we have to go before everyone wakes up and sees this orange shitstain for what he is?
The dude literally invited Russian state media and said “this will be great TV”.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist but…
It’s not a conspiracy if it’s true haha
how low do we have to go before everyone wakes up and sees this orange shitstain for what he is?
I don’t think anyone capable of seeing it doesn’t already see it. We have to make it through these four years as a nation and somehow move forward despite them all.
If congress somehow gets Trump removed via impeachment or similar means (I know the chances are near zero) I fully expect magas to be shooting people in the streets a day later, or a much more violent Jan 6 style event.
how low do we have to go before everyone wakes up and sees this orange shitstain for what he is?
“It’s easier to fool a man than to convince him he’d been fooled.” - Mark Twain
We have our work cut out for us when dealing with republicans.
Yeah, it’s amazing. He’s not a “Republican” he’s Trump. He’s not your friend/ally/supporter no matter who you are, he only supports himself. Your welfare is only vaguely relevant so long as it directly supports his status, the instant you aren’t useful, you will get backstabbed hard.
Unfortunately that’s not a particularly useful fact to highlight to republicans, and democrats bet too heavily on that being a talking point and it won them no favors.
This was absolutely an ambush. Trump and Vance had a script and reactions ready to go, thinking they were going to get under Zelensky’s skin, justifying Vance’s angry reaction. But Zelensky stayed calm and reserved and Vance still has his angry outburst. Trump and Vance embarrassed the country, looking like toddlers screaming when they don’t get their way.
And every Republican who backs this is vile scum, but that’s to be expected from the GOP. Trump and Vance taking America to new lows every day and the GOP just doubling down on it.
Lets be honest here, Trump and Vance didn’t orchestrate anything.
Putin did.
He wanted the weapons stopped, and he gave them a script.
Now the weapons have stopped as of a couple hours ago.
Just finally watched it, he actually deflected most of their accusations on the spot 💪 These guys are making deals, lying on their part and not giving a flying fuck on the very probable future events. All Trump got was that he is special, and that is why the truce will hold this time 🫨
Edit. I don’t know what to make of this, they and everybody sure need peace, it is also bold to not see that card…
I say that too. Pure theatre for Putin and for trump’s crappy ratings. It’s exactly what Putin does to boost his ratings - start a war.
You could tell. Vance is an awful actor …
It was obviously performative when Trump said, “you don’t get to tell us what we’re going to feel” when Zelensky said that the US will feel the effect of the war.
It’s was after JD already escalated and Trump had to grab something to be a critical about, and that was the arbitrary point he decided to cling onto. He had to because JD upped the ante and Trump HAD to do something to keep up
Orchestrated or not, it was a fucking cowardly spectacle.
Trump and Vance aren’t actors, it shows.
I’m not the biggest fan of Merz by any means, but credit where it’s due - it’s fantastic that he specifically and unambiguously called this out on the geopolitical stage.
His stance on Ukraine and the European Union is the silver lining for me with the CDU win tbh. Things might actually improve on these topics over Olaf Scholz.
Right? I have been consistently underwhelmed at how… well, flaccid Scholz has been on the European leadership front. Dude comes off like he wants everything signed in triplicate before he’s willing to consider appointing a discussion board to evaluate possibility of thinking about making a decision.
I want to point out that a very small fraction of the US deliberately did this. Like less than 100 out of 300M. Most of us, and when I say most, I mean nearly ALL of US citizens, and more, are horrified.
The US is a representative democracy, and those were its chosen representatives. Sorry, but you can’t collectively vote Trump into office and then immediately go “woah, we have nothing to do with any of this!” When he turns out to be exactly what everyone expected him to be.
It’s actually looking pretty likely that they didn’t actually win. How very odd that Musk is suddenly buddy buddy with Trump, when he oh so very coincidentally has a team of programmer man children who have a number of proof of concept examples for invisibly changing votes on voting machines.
Do you have any sources I can read up on? This is the first I hear of this.
https://www.newsweek.com/2024-election-rigged-donald-trump-elon-musk-2019482 https://apnews.com/article/voting-machines-voting-custodio-elections-philadelphia-f8a6453dc9e211ef20e9412d003511b1 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/voting-experts-warn-of-serious-threats-for-2024-from-election-equipment-software-breaches https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/online-vulnerable-experts-find-nearly-three-dozen-u-s-voting-n1112436
etc etc. There’s a lot of stuff parroting the company line of ‘Oh, well starlink couldn’t have done anything to change the vote, these machines aren’t online!’
Except we already know they’re vulnerable, we already know that if you get into one of the machines, you can spread the malicious to code to offline machines, we know that secure USBs and drives WERE stolen and modified, we know they’re online despite countless claims they aren’t, we know they were going through starlink, and (while i was no longer able to find proof of it, because they went through and scrubbed their resumes, work history, online presence) last I saw at least one of the DOGE team goons was part of a research group for voting machines. Admittedly, I can no longer find the proof of that, so you may take that as you wish.
Fact is though, computer and security scientists have been desperately crying out for years that these machines are compromised in ways that do not get caught by standard checks.
(sorry for the copy paste, but yeah. This isn’t even touching the literal known billions spent on voter suppression, gerrymandering, advertising, concerted media sanewashing, etc etc.)
I wanted to get back to you on this to thank you for the sources. Much appreciated.
No problem!
