A question about the Trump & Vance meeting with Zelensky
There is a discussion on the hell forum about Donald Trump. It has reacted very vociferously to the meeting last Friday. I was the first person to do so, and I stand by what I said there. However, virtually everybody who has posted there in the last two days has been from the UK. Donald Trump was already pretty unpopular here. I don't know whether this will surprise shipmates in the USA, or even elsewhere in the world, but by their behaviour, both Trump and Vance have drawn down almost universal disgust upon themselves over here. Non-Brits may not pick up how significant this reference is, but even the Daily Mail agrees.
Now, my question is not 'what do you think of Messrs Trump and Vance?' I am fully aware that most transatlantic shipmates already don't like them. There is plenty of scope to express views on them on the 'Donald ******* Trump' thread.
My question is more curiosity as to what peoples' reactions to this meeting elsewhere in the world and especially, what can shipmates in the USA tell the rest of us about the state of public opinion there. That is not necessarily 'what do you think about it?' - though that is interesting - so much as how does that sort of behaviour play in your country. As a general principle, it doesn't play well here at all. Deliberately humiliating somebody else in public, taking advantage of power to cause them to lose face, is usually a huge no-no, one that is very likely to backfire on the perpetrator, as it has done on both of them here. It has left me wondering if there really is a cross-cultural disjunction here, even possibly a non-comprehension. Is that sort of thing less unacceptable because it could be defended as straight-talking, the verbal equivalent of carrying a firearm and being prepared to use it?
This is a serious query and I have deliberately put it in Purgatory so as to avoid hellish discussion. As far as I am concerned, that belongs in the other thread.
Now, my question is not 'what do you think of Messrs Trump and Vance?' I am fully aware that most transatlantic shipmates already don't like them. There is plenty of scope to express views on them on the 'Donald ******* Trump' thread.
My question is more curiosity as to what peoples' reactions to this meeting elsewhere in the world and especially, what can shipmates in the USA tell the rest of us about the state of public opinion there. That is not necessarily 'what do you think about it?' - though that is interesting - so much as how does that sort of behaviour play in your country. As a general principle, it doesn't play well here at all. Deliberately humiliating somebody else in public, taking advantage of power to cause them to lose face, is usually a huge no-no, one that is very likely to backfire on the perpetrator, as it has done on both of them here. It has left me wondering if there really is a cross-cultural disjunction here, even possibly a non-comprehension. Is that sort of thing less unacceptable because it could be defended as straight-talking, the verbal equivalent of carrying a firearm and being prepared to use it?
This is a serious query and I have deliberately put it in Purgatory so as to avoid hellish discussion. As far as I am concerned, that belongs in the other thread.
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Seconded, at least for me.
To know what the general vibe is in the US about it, I’d have to go to the same news sources as everyone else. Virtually all of my friends on Facebook and otherwise are similarly horrified by basically everything this administration does. I’m still always surprised by how low he/Musk can go, not because I expect better, but because I didn’t expect this or that specific insane, callous, and/or self-serving thing. I have to keep away from too much news just to keep my sanity.
There is also a large number of Americans who frankly didn't want the Russo-Ukrainian War and want it to go away. The paradox of being a superpower is that many Americans don't really want to bear the costs of being a superpower anymore, neither in casualties, foreign wars nor in taxes. Trump speaks to them by offering an easy fix.
Many of us are also tired of being expected to explain All-Things-American on threads about American politics in which most posters are not American. It just adds to the weight and takes more energy than many of us often have.
We are on the verge of losing people we can’t afford to lose in the Vietnamese community to deportation. I just had to take $740 in cash from a church member living below poverty line so that I can write a check (she has no bank account) to pay for her citizenship application, because the damned government bounced her fee waiver application back to her without the courtesy of a reason for rejection (the website says you can get assistance if you make three times what she’s living on). They wrote only, “no check enclosed”, and added something ominous about running out of time to file. (What the hell? There’s no time limit specified anywhere.) She’s elderly and disabled and wouldn’t cope if deported to Vietnam away from her husband. Yes, she’s a legal resident, but we all know what threats have been made even against naturalized citizens, don’t we?
I am personally involved in all the resistance stuff I can handle, but I know very well what a drop in the bucket that is. I am aware of how horribly shameful this all is on the international stage, and while I think we could do with some humbling, I never wanted it to come this way. I am deeply grieved that there are actually people in this country stupid enough to vote for such evil people, but if the evidence that piled up in public during the past four years didn’t convince them, what will?
And now, I suppose very naturally, we’ve got people assuming our silence means we agree with these… creatures.
I just can’t even.
Trumps electoral base and those who voted for a signifcant minority (now a majority) of Republican congressmen have been consistently against military aid to Ukraine and Trump has capitalized on that by promising "peace in a day". So I was referring to the 47% or so of Americans who voted for Trump, an anti-Ukraine aid Republican congressman or both.
Being a superpower and the world's premier weapons manufacturer means the US gets these sorts of military aid requests frequently. It's the price of being on top, it's never going to stop. But it wears at the collective patience that is available for each new crisis.
"...didn't want the Russo-Ukrainian War and want it to go away" was perhaps not the most precise phrasing, since, as you state, it wasn't Americans who pushed for the war.
I might fine-tune it as "There is a certain number of Americans who do not want their country to support any side in the Russo-Ukrainian War, and Trump is catering to those people."
FWIW, I would say the same thing about public opinion on the Russo-Ukrainian War in Canada, there's a small but still probably doube-digit segment of the electorate who want nothing to do with helping Ukraine. You see less pandering to them by top-level politicians, prob'ly because the Ukrainian community in Canada tends to be politucally inclined and somewhat aware of things happening in Ukraine. If I had to guess, I'd say the most anti-Ukrainian party is the People's Party, who aren't represented in parliament, and the more trumpian sections of the Conservative base, but not its actual MPs.
No!
This is not at all the way we think any person should interact with another. All the reactions I've heard are of shock and disgust. And furious anger.
I live in a deep red area of my state, and I have to be very careful about the people I talk to about this. Which is a bit scary when thinking in the context of the First Amendment. Free speech and all that. However I have talked to some conservative Republican friends who have been horrified since the election. So, I know Friday's bullying session would have been as disgusting to them as it is to me. We just haven't had a chance to talk in private yet.
My gay and trans friends have been very afraid, to the point of making plans to relocate if things go really wrong, and Friday's despicable bullying has made them even more frightened. And not just them. There are other folks with lives that don't fit the Trump/Vance/Musk platform who are also thinking of what they might need to do to stay safe.
Also, we are very aware that the only real President at the meeting (Zelenskyy) was speaking respectfully in English. I doubt seriously if Trump and Vance would have even considered offering the same courtesy to President Zelenskyy.
Still, the wording is misleading, as it suggests almost half of all Americans period are Trump supporters. You’d have to go elsewhere to determine that. (Me, I suspect the reason he succeeded was because those same voters couldn’t stomach electing a woman to the presidency—much less a nonwhite woman).
I'm a little bit bemused by these kinds of remarks, especially when they come from former Republican voters.
Trump didn't create a brand new voting coalition. The best predictor of whether someone was likely to vote for Trump this time around was whether they had voted Republican in the past.
So if you are attributing things like that to Republicans this time round wasn't it a tendency that was always present ?
I hear up in the Grit Valhalla, Clifford Sifton keeps a pretty low profile.
This is a gross oversimplification of what's happening here. Most Americans don't spend a lot of time thinking about US status as a superpower and don't really care about it either way; people just want to get through their days and their lives and have more immediate things to consider. We don't think, "It costs too much to be a superpower." What many of us think is that we just spent a couple of decades in a war that was a total waste of money and lives, we only recently got out of it, and we don't want to get dragged into another conflict. If you're not spending a lot of time thinking about US power abroad, if you're just trying to figure out how you're going to pay for eggs, which have doubled in price in less than 6 months, if you're trying to get by driving for Uber or working in an Amazon warehouse, it doesn't make a lot of sense that so many things that are happening on other continents are somehow our problem. They are, of course, because we've made them our problem, but that's not something a lot of people are even going to know. And it's easy to say the US is spending too much on foreign aid, whether that's for Ukraine or USAID, and to draw a line from money going to foreign aid to the very real financial problems a lot of Americans face because a lot of people don't realize that it's the huge corporations and poor regulation that are creating their financial problems. Foreign aid, money for refugee resettlement, money for "welfare queens" ... government is too busy spending money on them to help the rest of us -- people have been sold this bullshit zero-sum argument for a long time, and sad to say, many believe it.
I for one never wanted to bear the costs of being a superpower, and Trump doesn't speak to me at all. It's not as though Americans alive today got a choice about living in a superpower. This was accomplished 80 years ago, out of most living memory.
Why aren't you seeking out the published opinions of Americans who can ably speak about this?
Heather Cox Richardson wrote about it here; she is an American historian at Boston College whose specialty is 19th-century American history and who writes a daily newsletter that does a great job of putting contemporary events in the US into an historical context.
Liz Cheney massively disapproved; she was a Republican Congressional Representative from Wyoming and is the daughter of former VP Dick Cheney.
From MSNBC, a news organization that leans left: Chris Hayes said "Trump irreparably destroyed the 80-year-old post-World War II international order.”
For a more general view: Saturday Night Live, a 50-year-old sketch comedy show that is a cultural touchstone in the US, mocked Trump's behavior.
Fox News tried to normalize it, saying Biden lost his temper with Zelenskyy once back in 2022.
I think @Sober Preacher's Kid was analyzing the sentiment the way it would get analyzed in an academic context, and you are analyzing it as it would appear at the level of everyday thought and discussion.
From what I've seen of anti-Ukraine sentiment in the W. Europe and the anglosphere, it tends to flow outta the same emotional and moral currents as anti-foreign aid sentiment(*). Having experienced that latter phenomenon up close, I'll observe that it is not incompatible with worrying about financial and employment problems.
(*) As opposed to, say, liberals and leftists opposing US intervention in Central America in the 1980s, who mostly woulda seen their cause as mixed in with altruistic foreign-aid policies. Maryknoll Nuns etc.
How did you get the idea @Lamb Chopped is attributing things to Republicans that weren't always there? I seriously don't see how you get that out of her post.
Can you think of any large group of people that doesn’t have all tendencies present in it at some level?
You’re talking as if a huge number of people were completely homogeneous in everything they think. Can’t you see that’s the sort of stereotyping that’s got us into all these political messes to start with?
All republicans are not the same.
All Americans are not the same.
Hell, all Trump voters are not the same. At least a few of them have begun to regret their choices already.
We need to start seeing each other as human beings and not as caricatures. It’s fine to note tendencies, it is wrong to reduce people to no more than a tendency.
Well, there are two possibilities...
1. No electorally significant portion of the American public agrees with Trump on Ukraine.
2.
OR...
2. There is an electorally significant portion of the American public(of whatever absolute size) who agree with Trump on Ukraine.
I tend to assume the latter to be true, and it's kinda what I'm taking the rough meaning of @Sober Preacher's Kid's post to be. And while I maybe wouldn't have generalized about the entire 47% of Trump voters, OTOH if you vote for the party that has legalize arson as part of its platform but only because you like their policy on paving roads, I still don't think you get to complain TOO loudly if someone carelessly lumps you in with the firebug bloc of the coalition.
But since Americans are already involved in supporting Ukraine, it seems logical to assume that more of them would have an opinion on it.
Did you even look at the numbers from Pew Research? You don't need to assume anything. There is polling data.
And your disdain for human beings who were lied to and who will feel the ill effects of their votes for Trump far more than you will is noted.
Well, if it helps establish my bona fides, for the first time in my life I am having to factor in the possibility of economic strangulation, if not outright invasion, in outlining my future plans.
And I didn't even get a vote in creating this situation. Unlike the folks who decided that the lies being told by a proven liar were now somehow credible.
As for the Pew numbers, just checked 'em. 30% of Americans think their country is doing too much for Ukraine, and 47% of Republicans. Sounds to me like a significant bloc of voters, at least significant enough for Trump to keep in mind when formulating how to present the issue to the public.
I'm not blaming any Americans here for the fact that some Americans agree with Trump on Ukraine. I'm saying that 30% of Americans, and 47% of Republicans, seems like enough to be an electorally significant tendency.
This is what makes me so angry here. So often there's little to no consideration for American shipmates as individuals. We're somehow supposed to be representative of and speak for 340 million people as if Americans were all in lock-step agreement.
@Enoch's OP asks if we have any idea how rude Trump's treatment of Zelenskyy looks to the rest of the world, as if we were all raised by wolves. The reference to gun ownership as a possibly explanatory metaphor is just icing on the cake.
I am so fucking tired of this shit. American shipmates are individuals deserving of courtesy. Why is that so damned hard for the rest of you to understand?
If shipmates from any other country were witness to and subject to the utter upheaval the US is going through, would you address them in such terms? Treat them like this? Demand explanations? Wonder why they weren't turning up in endless discussions in Hell? You wouldn't, but in this case it's the US, so we're fair game.
No, @stetson, your "bona fides" don't mean shit to me. The US is careening towards disaster at a level the country hasn't seen since the Civil War, so just be happy you're up there in the safety of Canada.
Huh? Where have I said that I think American Shipmates are representative of all Americans? I am discussing the opinions of those Americans who support Trump on Russia, and how important they would be in his electoral calculations. That comes nowhere near to saying all Americans hold those views. The 30% reported by Pew sounds credible enough to me.
Well, Trump is planning to impose on Canada tariffs that most economists agree will do serious damage to our economy, and has said that if Canada wants to avoid this, we should join the USA. And while he hasn't threatened military action toward this end, he has implied that he'd consider an invasion in regards to Greenland. So, "the safety of Canada" might not be quite the comforting fallback it was only four months ago.
Tariffs on Canadian imports to the US will hurt both economies. If you want to feel like Canadians will suffer more than Americans during the next four years, I can't stop you. I doubt the US will invade Canada. I also doubt the next Canadian PM will do the damage to Canada that Trump is intent on doing to the US. Will Canadians be hurt? Yes. The world's most powerful country is led by a malevolent buffoon, so one way or another much of the world will be hurt, if only because the world's biggest polluter has decided to behave as if climate change isn't real. But don't try to make me feel sorry for you, because it just isn't going to happen.
Okay? But you were the one who brought up this tendency and implied it was present in electoral significant amounts in the Republican voting base, hence my bemusement.
The train-wreck *meeting* appears to have prompted some quick action in Europe (and the UK, which should be part of the EU, but isn't, because lunacy). Countries here will have to deal with Trump, but working together, rather than separately.
Also, there's a question of why people gave the answer they did. Do they believe as a matter of principle that other nations should stand on their own feet and get no aid at all? Or, that giving aid is the responsibility of individual choice to give to particular causes and the government should have no role in that at all? Maybe they think the government should be giving aid, but in the current economy they believe it's not affordable? Again, the published data is silent on that as well.
The US population is 340m. To really know "what Americans think" you'll probably need to ask them all. And, because I see no real difference between Americans and everyone else, if you ask in a way that really gets their opinions, rather than which of a small number of boxes they're closest to fitting in, you'll get 340m slightly different opinions. Because no two people ever share exactly the same views, even when they're broadly in agreement. An no one can speak for anyone other than themselves.
Contrast Trump/Vance and their obvious hostility towards Zelenskyy with the warmth of the greeting Sir Keir Starmer gave the latter - and Starmer is not AFAIK a particularly demonstrative or touchy-feely man.
Note also the fact that King Charles received Zelenskyy, fairly informally, at one of the royal family residences, which (I am told) speaks volumes as to the King's personal attitude towards the President and his country.
Those of us over here in the UK (and Europe generally) can only watch (and maybe pray) whilst events unfold across the Pond, and the reticence of people like @Lamb Chopped is to be respected.
Did you read the rest of that post?
Yes, I think that tendency existed in those particular voters at that particular time. But my point was that we can't and shouldn't reduce people to their tendencies, as if they could never change their minds--as if they were robots, caricatures of a real human being. By all means, explore tendencies in a given situation. But when you generalize about millions of people in a single group, for all events past and present, you are going beyond examining an event and going well into stereotyping. Which removes their humanity.
(@stetson, I didn't say you were saying American shipmates have to speak for all Americans - I didn't address you specifically there, and I was referring to the existence of this thread.)
The meeting with Zelenskyy (where, btw, are the Purgatory thread pedants re: spelling his name correctly?) was a egregiously transparent set-up, staged and scripted for bullying, insult, dismissiveness, and ridicule. Russian State Media loved it and said as much, with right-wing, MAGA American social media proudly and loudly recapitulating it.
I did, but I was responding to a post which went from "almost half of all Americans period are Trump supporters." to "those same voters".
It would be like asking what British people thought about Brexit, for instance, assuming that there was a single and monolithic consensus on the issue.
Of course there'll be MAGA-ish Americans who think Trump and Vance behaved wonderfully. And non-MAGA-ish Americans who think their behaviour was appalling.
I still come across British people who think Boris Johnson was a wonderful PM.
I meet others who think he is the Devil Incarnate. Which view represents the British public as a whole?
The question you asked was phrased clumsily in my opinion and I can understand why US Shipmates are reacting against it.
Although I can remember Michael Heseltine saying, years ago, well before the Ukrainian war, that the West really ought to be trying to work with Russia rather than against it.
The idea was that we both faced Islamist terrorism and a threat from China.
For non-UK Shipmates, Heseltine was once a member of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet.
So there have been voices calling for rapprochement with Russia for some time. I don't know whether Heseltine would say that now.
It'll be interesting to see whether Starmer can keep his balance on his unenviable high-wire act.
Blair expressed exactly the same sentiment for the same reasons post Maidan.