When Russian forces crashed over the borders into Ukraine in 2022 determined to wipe it off the map as an independent state, the United States rushed to aid the beleaguered nation and cast its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a hero of resistance.
Three years almost to the day later, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Ukraine, in this version, is not a victim but a villain. And Mr. Zelensky is not a latter-day Winston Churchill, but a “dictator without elections” who somehow started the war himself and conned America into helping.
Mr. Trump’s revisionism sets the stage for a geopolitical about-face unlike any in generations as the president embarks on negotiations with Russia that Ukraine fears could come at its own expense. By vilifying Mr. Zelensky and shifting blame for the war from Moscow to Kyiv, Mr. Trump seems to be laying a predicate for withdrawing support for an ally under attack.
The sharp exchange of words between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky this week signaled how much has changed with the inauguration of a new president in Washington. Even for Mr. Trump, who has never been a fan of Ukraine and has long expressed admiration of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the vitriol expressed toward Mr. Zelensky drew gasps of surprise on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
A day after falsely declaring that Ukraine started the war, Mr. Trump doubled down on Wednesday with a remarkable broadside against the leader of an ally, built on a lie. “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.
It was a striking distortion of reality. Mr. Zelensky did not talk the United States into giving him money “to go into a war.” He and his country were attacked, and only then did the United States under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. respond with expansive financial assistance. And even then, it has been only about a third of what Mr. Trump claimed.
But Mr. Trump went on, characterizing Mr. Zelensky not as a defender of democracy but an enemy of it. “He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Mr. Trump wrote. “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
While Ukraine has suspended elections during the war, Mr. Zelensky was in fact originally elected by a landslide in 2019 in a contest deemed free and fair by the international community — unlike Mr. Putin, an actual dictator who has stayed in power for a quarter-century through elections widely deemed to be farces. And Mr. Zelensky enjoys a 57 percent approval rating, according to a new poll, higher than Mr. Trump’s.
The president’s “dictator” jab came just hours before he referred to himself online regarding a domestic issue as “the king,” followed up by a White House official who posted an illustration of Mr. Trump in royal garb.
The president’s attack on Mr. Zelensky, while sparing any harsh words for Mr. Putin, provoked outrage among European leaders, Democrats in Washington and even a few Republicans who were willing to speak out.
“Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war,” Mike Pence, his former vice president, said online. “Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.”
Charles M. Kupperman, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term, compared the president’s actions to the British prime minister who tried to appease Adolf Hitler by agreeing to give him part of Czechoslovakia. “Trump’s name will be remembered in history as a surrender artist just like Neville Chamberlain,” Mr. Kupperman said in an interview.
Moscow, on the other hand, seemed delighted. Dmitri A. Medvedev, a senior adviser to Mr. Putin who served as caretaker president for four years, cited Mr. Trump’s comments about Mr. Zelensky being a dictator without elections. “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” he wrote online. Mr. Trump, he added, “is 200 percent right. Bankrupt clown.”
There is of course a long history of American presidents growing frustrated with the leaders of foreign allies they were trying to help during wartime. Franklin D. Roosevelt never liked Charles de Gaulle even as U.S. troops fought to liberate France. John F. Kennedy was so alienated by South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem that his government did not discourage a coup.
George W. Bush and Barack Obama both found Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq to be mercurial and unconstructive. Mr. Biden certainly grew angry with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel even as he backed his war on Hamas. For that matter, Mr. Biden’s relationship with Mr. Zelensky could be prickly at times.
But those presidents still supported the allies’ cause, while it is not clear that Mr. Trump does. And as with so many things, Mr. Trump goes much further than his predecessors in terms of public vitriol against an ally facing an existential threat, employing the kind of language that presidents rarely use about an ostensible friend.
Vice President JD Vance, who in 2022 said that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” went as far as to warn Mr. Zelensky not to fight back. After Mr. Zelensky complained on Wednesday that Mr. Trump was “caught in a web of disinformation,” Mr. Vance told The Daily Mail that such comments would only backfire.
“The idea that Zelensky is going to change the president’s mind by bad-mouthing him in public media,” he said, is “an atrocious way to deal with this administration.”
Mr. Trump has never been particularly sympathetic to Ukraine even before the latest fighting. As far back as his first campaign for president in 2016, he signaled that he could accept Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and expressed admiration for Mr. Putin’s strength.
His disregard for Ukraine later grew into outright animosity as he became persuaded that Ukraine had intervened in the 2016 election against him, repeating a propaganda line pushed by Russia, which actually did intervene in the election on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, his ally and lawyer who was in touch with Ukrainian figures seeking influence, encouraged this line of thinking, so much so that Mr. Trump increasingly saw Ukraine as a personal adversary.
“Trump was driven in his first term by the intense desire to disprove any Russian collusion in the 2016 election,” Mr. Kupperman recalled. “He wanted to demonstrate he won without any outside influence or interference, and it gnawed at him when it came to allegations that he won because of Russian assistance. Ukraine became one path to demonstrate he won without any such assistance.”
That ultimately led to the famous phone call with Mr. Zelensky in 2019 pushing Ukraine to help tarnish Mr. Biden, then the leading Democratic candidate for president, by announcing a corruption investigation. Mr. Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine at the same time and only released it under pressure by advisers and Republican senators. Revelations about his actions led to his impeachment by the House later that year.
When Russia mounted its full-scale invasion in 2022, Mr. Trump offered little sympathy or support for Ukraine, even as blue-and-yellow flags went up around the United States in solidarity. In the days leading up to the attack, in fact, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin’s “genius” move in putting pressure on Ukraine.
In the years since, he has repeatedly questioned Mr. Biden’s decision to devote so much American money to defending Ukraine, much as the commentator Tucker Carlson and others on the far right of the Republican Party have, even while more mainstream party leaders were criticizing Mr. Biden for not doing more.
In response to Mr. Trump’s pressure, House Republicans blocked a new aid request for months, undercutting Ukrainian forces and giving Russian invaders time to regroup and stabilize their positions. Only after G.O.P. allies and foreign dignitaries lobbied him to relent did he permit House Republicans to let the aid go through.
But while many Americans might understandably oppose investing taxpayer dollars in someone else’s war, Mr. Trump goes further by questioning whether Ukraine is legitimately the injured party. Several times in recent days, he has expressed great distress over how many people have been killed and how much of the country has been destroyed.
Yet in doing so, he points to Mr. Zelensky, rather than Mr. Putin, as the author of all that carnage. “I love Ukraine,” he wrote on Wednesday, “but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died.”
