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It was supposed to be a simple ceremony at the White House last Friday. President Donald Trump would host Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a state ceremony, the two leaders would sign paperwork granting the U.S. access to a stake in Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, and the Ukranian people might finally begin to hope that an end was in sight to three long years of warfare with Russia. Instead, it quickly turned into a shouting match, where Zelenskyy’s supporters said Trump set up an ambush to embarrass him, while Trump’s supporters said Zelensky was disrespectful to the United States and tried to rewrite the deal in front of reporters. Reagan Reese is the White House correspondent for the Daily Caller; she appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to shed some light on how the meeting got turned upside-down.
Reese told host Larry Mendte that several reporters said Zelenskyy looked disrespectful. “Zelenskyy came in and, from the second he entered the Oval Office, really had this disrespectful posture to him. He was rolling his eyes at President Trump and [Vice-President] J.D. Vance, he was kind of interrupting them, just had this weird vibe about him that was quite disrespectful. Axios reported that one of the strikes against Zelenskyy was that he wasn’t wearing a suit, and that Trump advisers had actually told Zelenski multiple times, ‘Hey, you should really come wearing a suit; that’s one way to impress the President and make this go well,’ and he still didn’t [dress] up.”
Reese said senior White House officials told her Zelenskyy may have just not been used to how Trump and Vance operate after three years of dealing with Joe Biden: “These are two world leaders who are very different than what was in the Oval Office before, with President Biden, and so what they kind of stressed to me was that it just seems like Zelenskyy made a misplay, and that he didn’t really understand… these two world leaders and how to negotiate and work with them.”
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