Trump's latest Ukraine move shows whose side he's really on
Trump keeps showing the West exactly where his loyalties lie. The question is why we're still acting surprised.
It's gotten to the point where you'd think the message would be impossible to miss. Trump isn't hiding anymore. He's not even pretending.
Week after week, the US president finds new ways to signal that he's firmly in Putin's corner when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. Back in February, he hauled Zelenskyy into the Oval Office and told him flat out: "you don't have the cards." JD Vance was there too, making sure the Ukrainian leader understood he should be grateful for the meeting. It was humiliating, deliberate, and unmistakable.
But that apparently wasn't enough. This past week, Trump doubled down. He's not a mediator. He's not a peacemaker. He's made it abundantly clear he's allied with Putin's interests, not Ukraine's, and definitely not with the West's. The only mystery is why more people aren't treating this as the straightforward reality it is.
Part of the problem is that the West—Britain included—keeps waiting for Trump to reveal some hidden agenda or surprise reversal. We keep hoping he's playing 4D chess or that there's some strategy we're not seeing yet. There isn't. He's just telling us who he is, over and over, and we're collectively struggling to accept it.
The dangerous bit isn't that Trump is being subtle or coded about his allegiances. It's that he's been explicit, almost to the point of comedy, and we're still treating it like an open question. When the leader of the most powerful military on Earth announces—in multiple ways, across multiple occasions—that he's not really committed to the democratic West and that he'd rather work with its adversaries, that's the moment to stop looking for hidden meanings and start preparing accordingly.
The old sense of security, the assumption that America would show up when things got bad, that's gone now. Europe and Britain can't rely on that anymore. Which means the investment required to protect ourselves just got a lot bigger, and a lot more urgent. We'll have to spend what's needed to build real defenses, because counting on Washington clearly isn't an option anymore.
