“Have you said ‘thank you’ once?”

President Donald Trump, right, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine during a heated exchange in the Oval Office, in which the American leader and his vice president berated Zelenskyy, Feb. 28, 2025. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By Bret Stephens

Even now, two months and countless fiascos and embarrassments later, I struggle to wrap my head around the enormity that was President Donald Trump’s Oval Office meeting at the end of February with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The Ukrainian president arrived in the White House that day in a way no battle-scarred ally ever has before or ever should again: as the object of Trump’s slander, called a “dictator” by the leader of the free world. Worse, Zelenskyy was expected to sign over billions of dollars of Ukraine’s mineral resources. All this in exchange for no firm administration commitments for continued military aid.

You remember the rest: After politely sitting through 40 minutes of the news conference, Zelenskyy quibbled with JD Vance when the vice president — a guy who had previously said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine” — ambushed him with a disingenuous suggestion to try diplomacy. Ukraine had been trying diplomacy with Russia for decades, going so far as to give up its nuclear deterrent in exchange for international security guarantees, only to be invaded twice.

The meeting descended from there, with Vance falsely accusing Zelenskyy of campaigning for Kamala Harris and not thanking Trump. Trump weighed in to tell Zelenskyy he didn’t “have the cards” and to keep quiet. Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s indefatigable ambassador to the United States, was left holding her head in her hands.

She wasn’t the only one: Millions of Americans of goodwill also cringed. Never in our history has a president so publicly humiliated a foreign leader in any setting, much less the Oval Office. And Zelenskyy isn’t just any foreign leader — Ukraine is a U.S. ally, defending itself against a Russian war of aggression. Inasmuch as Trump represents America, he turned us into a nation of boors.

But the personal incivility paled next to the diplomatic idiocy. The U.S. still doesn’t have the minerals deal that Trump so dearly wanted (although a memorandum of intent was recently signed). Russia, which rejoiced at the meeting, ignored Trump’s call for a ceasefire, putting his promise to end the war on the first day of his administration even further out of reach. European states rallied around Zelenskyy, reducing, not increasing, U.S. leverage in the conflict.

In “Animal House,” Dean Wormer tells Flounder that “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.” Someone ought to tell Trump, Vance and other administration lemmings that nasty, dishonest and stupid is no way to conduct foreign policy.

Since then, Russia has continued to press its barbaric attack while Ukraine fights on. All the meeting accomplished was to give America’s friends and foes a clearer sense of the dangerously self-infatuated fool in the White House.