The Free Press
Historical revisionism is in vogue these days. It’s bad when it comes from a spurious historian who thinks that Winston Churchill is the villain of World War II. It’s worse—much worse—when falsehoods emanate from the president of the United States. Yet there was Donald Trump on Tuesday, spouting what can only be called a fake version of recent history in Ukraine—so recent, in fact, it’s not yet even history.
He faulted Ukraine, and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for having “started” the war in that country. He claimed that the Ukrainian leader, widely hailed in Europe for resisting Russian aggression, enjoys only a “4 percent” approval rating at home. For good measure, he accused Zelensky of being a “dictator,” who should have to stand for election before he can have a seat at peace negotiations. The Financial Times reports that the Trump administration is balking at labeling Russia the aggressor—which it clearly was—in the G7’s statement for the war’s third anniversary February 24.
An unfortunate reality of this moment is that terms like disinformation, fake news, and lies have been leached of meaning and weaponized by the left. Yet all apply to the president’s words.
For the record:
On February 22, 2022, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, having rebuffed repeated appeals from the U.S. and European countries to settle his differences with Ukraine peacefully, sent a huge army across an internationally recognized border, bent on conquering his neighbor and kidnapping its leadership, including Zelensky.
Ukraine and its friends in the West offered to discuss with Putin Russia’s legitimate security concerns. Putin, however, delivered a rambling speech on the eve of the war in which he justified the aggression by asserting, falsely, that “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia” but had fallen under a “Nazi” regime. (Zelensky is Jewish.)
Trump’s claim that Zelensky’s approval rating is 4 percent echoes a Russian propaganda theme, but there is no evidence for it. A survey this month from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found Zelensky enjoyed a 57 percent approval rating, which is a few points higher than Trump’s. As for the president’s complaint that Zelensky, with the support of parliament, delayed elections that were scheduled for last April, this is unsurprising given that Ukraine is fighting a war for its very survival against a nuclear-armed neighbor. In any case, the country whose attacks make elections in Ukraine hard to carry out—Russia—is itself a one-man dictatorship that allows zero freedom of speech or anything else.
Trump’s biggest gripe is that America has provided weapons and economic aid to Ukraine since Russia launched its war of conquest in 2022. He grossly overstated the amount on Wednesday, by the way; it’s $183 billion, not $350 billion.
Has Trump forgotten his own record? One of his first-term moves was to reverse his predecessor Barack Obama’s policy against directly arming Ukraine after Russia launched its first war against it in 2014. As Trump—appropriately—boasted to Fox News in 2022, “Russia has gotten in deeper than they ever thought possible” because of “the weapons that I gave and that the Ukrainians used so well.”
What’s more, Trump never took part in the European-led peace talks, known as the Minsk Agreements process, which were stacked in Russia’s favor. Trump withdrew from a key nuclear arms control treaty after the State Department confirmed that Russia was cheating. It’s true that Trump took Putin’s side at his infamous meeting in Helsinki in 2018, but otherwise his policies remained tough-minded.
In that sense, Trump even has half a point when he claims that there might not have been a war at all if he had still been president in 2022.
Now though, Trump’s line syncs with Russian propaganda, and its key theme, which is that the war started only because the West insisted on NATO membership for Ukraine. The president’s falsehoods are doubly concerning in the context of J.D. Vance’s scolding of European allies at Munich, in which the vice president rightly faulted governments for censorship but wrongly implied that this “enemy within” was a bigger threat than Moscow’s aggression.
Even after those remarks, and the exclusion of Europe and Ukraine itself from initial U.S.-Russian talks in Saudi Arabia, it was possible to think that the Trump administration was engaged in a grand “tough love” strategy whose endgame would be a Europe that spends enough on its own defense—and a secure Ukraine. “Real” negotiations were still to come, according to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; and Ukraine and Europe would be involved in those.
Still barely possible, that hopeful scenario seems less likely now that Trump has attacked Ukraine and its leader, who won an election in 2019, then bravely stayed in Kyiv to lead resistance after Russia’s invasion, spurning Joe Biden’s offer of a helicopter ride to safety and exile.
It is true that some of Ukraine’s supporters have also committed the sins of omission and hyperbole. Zelensky is not a perfect leader; no leader is. And as our own Tanya Lukyanova reported this week, USAID funding has gone to Ukrainian media outlets that demonized Ukrainians accused of interfering with recruitment by reporting on abuses. But no amount of wasted foreign aid or imperfect domestic alliances justifies Russia’s war of conquest or U.S. abandonment of an ally in peril.
Ideas have consequences. Trump’s false ideas about Ukraine could help establish a precedent: Aggression gets rewarded, and resistance to it gets punished. At a minimum, he has damaged the trust upon which Ukraine’s cooperation in any settlement would depend. A dishonest narrator of the war cannot be an honest broker of peace.
The story of the JFK conspiracy theory isn’t just about a few hucksters red-pilling traumatized Boomers. No. It’s also about how the government squandered its most precious asset: the trust of the American people. This week on “Breaking History,” Eli Lake examines the chain of events that led Donald Trump to declassify the remaining files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination.