If you want to understand why last Friday’s Oval Office press conference between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went off the rails, ignore most of what you are seeing in the corporate media. Anyone watching a video of the entire event, instead of the deceptively edited clips featured on most “news” sites, will see that neither the President nor the Vice President “ambushed” Zelensky. The first 39 minutes of the meeting were unremarkable, with President Trump attempting to be cordial despite the Ukrainian president’s Marvel Comics costume and pugnacious comportment.

The argument erupted after a reporter suggested that Trump was “too closely aligned” with Vladimir Putin to negotiate a fair cease fire between Russia and Ukraine. The President answered, “If I didn’t align myself with both of them, you’d never have a deal.” The Vice President added that the last administration’s belligerent rhetoric had accomplished nothing positive and contended that a better path to peace was diplomacy. This set off Zelensky, who launched into a gratuitous lecture on the war, which he concluded with this disrespectful challenge: “What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?” Vance responded thus: ….

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