Browse through Donald Trump’s ghostwritten memoir, The Art of the Deal, and you’ll come across an aphorism which will go some way to explaining the US president’s approach to negotiating. Having established that he would do nearly anything within legal bounds to win, Trump adds that: “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”
It’s an idea which makes a lot of sense when you consider Trump’s record. We saw it time and again on the campaign trail, as he sought to seal the deal with the US public by repeatedly denigrating first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Which begs the question, in seeking to make a deal to end the war in Ukraine, exactly who he sees as the competition he needs to denigrate: Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelensky?
Trump has certainly gone out of his way to excoriate the Ukrainian president over the past day or two, both in public and on his TruthSocial platform. He has variously blamed Zelensky for starting the war, called him a “dictator without elections” and a “modestly successful comedian … very low in Ukrainian polls” who “has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died”.
