The Secret Behind Trump's NATO Disaster
They’re not scared of him anymore.
There is a moment from the NATO summit in Ankara this week that historians will fight over, and it isn’t the communiqué.
Donald Trump, sitting next to Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO summit, mused aloud that Putin wanted to hold peace talks in Moscow. Then he turned to the president of Ukraine, a man whose country has been bled white by Russian missiles striking civilian targets for four and a half years, and asked him if he’d go.
Zelenskyy, a comedian by trade and a brilliant wartime leader by necessity, didn’t blink. “It’s difficult,” he said. “There are a lot of Ukrainian drones there.” His comic and political timing was perfection.
The room exploded. Reporters laughed. Zelenskyy landed the cleanest kill shot of the summit without raising his voice, and Trump sat there slackly grinning like a man who wasn’t entirely of the punchline.
He was the punchline
