Mirror Assistant Editor and columnist Darren Lewis weighs in on Donald Trump’s aggressive attack on Volodymyr Zelensky and the message it sends to the next generation
What a horrific message to be sending out to our kids.
Bullies win. The inquest will be into whether you appeased them enough, whether you tempered your language enough, whether you bent the knee enough. It will suggest that YOU are the problem. Not them.
Forget the fact that the list of lies and appalling acts, for which your aggressor is proven to be on the hook, is as long as your arm.
So much of what we’ve seen and heard since last Friday has been an attempt to send out the worst possible message – that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is the one needing to look at himself.
Shock waves had reverberated around the planet as we watched, in disbelief, Trump and his henchman JD Vance trying to ambush him. Like you, my jaw dropped when I saw the historic 10 minutes that mattered.
It signalled (yet again) the end of any American leadership that could be characterised as reliable. It summed up America’s status now as one big reality TV show.
That shouting match was the confrontation moment in all of your favourite car crash, guilty pleasure programmes when the backbiting and the private sniping to camera comes to an explosive, eagerly-awaited head.
In the Oval Office, the fan-boy podcasters (lets not call them journalists) and hand-picked, cheerleading correspondents poking fun at Zelensky for the clothes he wore all fed into it. Playground stuff. (Clearly they’d forgotten Winston Churchill wore his air raid siren suit when he visited the White House during the Second World War.)
Throw it all together – the personal insults, the talking over Zelensky, the attempts to lecture him, accusing him of things he hadn’t done (and conveniently forgetting things he had) – and it all led to a spectacle you’ve seen a million times before in Big Brother, Come Dine With Me, Love Is Blind, The Real Housewives. Or, again, in the playground.
Distil it down further and the message being sent to the next generation, in a world inexorably consumed by toxic masculinity, was that unless you bend the knee or kiss the ring, you are the one in the wrong.
Go back a few days and yes, we all get it, Sir Keir Starmer had no alternative but to grab a torch and climb inside Trump’s jacksie, in the interests of diplomacy. That ‘special relationship’ is basically the UK making sure it can continue throwing its weight around with other countries, safe in the knowledge America will beat them up if they fight back.
But don’t you just hate the whole thing? Aren’t you disgusted by the odious Vance – who claimed in 2016 he’d never vote for Trump – now winding up the President to attack and then watching him go? Aren’t you fed up with the commentators trying to feed you the line that Trump supposedly wants peace rather than the actual Nobel Peace Prize.
Doesn’t it blow your mind that the said commentators miss out the fact that Trump campaigned on the claim that he’d end the Ukraine war in a day?
With that not having happened, he is now throwing the country under the bus, framing it as Zelensky’s fault.
Aren’t you fed up by the analysts claiming Zelensky should have gone to the White House cap in hand, as if he was seeing King Joffrey from Game of Thrones? Because those 10 viral minutes sent out the worst possible message to our society. It reinforced our need to ensure intimidation does not win.
Right now it feels as though we are fighting a losing battle.
