The real reason Trump hates Zelensky

Who’s afraid of Volodymyr Zelensky? Donald Trump and the Republican Party, that’s who. So much so that they have insulted and demonized the diminutive Ukrainian president as if he were the embodiment of evil.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, cavorts with Trump in Mar-a-Lago and no eyebrows are raised. Vladimir Putin routinely kills his opponents and tries to interfere with American elections, and Republican outrage is at best muted.

But poor Zelensky visits an ammunitions plant in Pennsylvania, and he and Oksana Markarova, the Ukrainian ambassador to Washington, are attacked for interfering in America’s elections.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is demanding that Zelensky fire Markarova.

The conservative response to Zelensky in general and during his visit to the U.S. in particular is, at best, completely asymmetric. (Recall Tucker Carlson’s characterization of Zelensky as “far closer to Lenin than to George Washington.”) What is really going on here?

Given the GOP’s transformation into a pliant arm of Trump, there’s little point in analyzing the views about Zelensky held by the party, its leaders and its followers. Trump, and his perceptions and self-perceptions, are all that matters.

Trump’s rhetoric makes clear that he feels threatened by Zelensky, whom he has called “the greatest salesman in history. Every time he comes into the country, he walks away with 60 billion dollars.”

Trump’s choice of the word “salesman” is obviously derogatory, the implication being that Zelensky is, like a used car salesman, pulling a fast one on naive Americans.

More important is Trump’s acknowledgment that Zelensky is the greatest salesman “in history.” We all know that the greatest dealmaker in history — and a dealmaker is just a glorified version of a salesman — is none other than Trump himself. Indeed, Trump is a genius, the smartest and best dealmaker, president, entrepreneur and so on, at least in his own mind.

In effect, Trump is admitting that Zelensky is too good at what he does, too is deserving of the world crown in dealmaking.

Zelensky, in short, is a threat. As Trump recently put it, “The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president — me.”

There can be only one favorite, just as there can be only one genius — and that person cannot be some little Ukrainian upstart.

How best to disarm Zelensky? It would make sense to focus on rational discourse focusing on Zelensky’s weaknesses — and there are many, as Ukrainians would be more than happy to point out. But that would be completely out of character for Trump, because genuine criticism presupposes knowledge.

Far better, then, to discredit the country that Zelensky represents by making outlandish and patently false claims about it. To that end, here’s what Trump said about Ukraine at a recent campaign rally: “Those gorgeous buildings with golden towers are demolished and laying broken on their side. You’ll never see that kind of a town or city again. They’ll never be duplicated. They’re all demolished, other than Kyiv. You’ll never be able to rebuild the cities or towns the way they are — impossible to do. They were thousands of years old. And just think about it, just three years ago, you had a beautiful civilization. Millions of people that were living that are not with us any longer.”

Ukrainians may feel flattered by Trump’s assertion that they have a unique civilization, but just about everything else in that statement is either exaggerated or false. And that’s precisely the point. Trump’s goal is to present Ukraine as a hopeless basket case and Zelensky, its consummate “salesman,” as a peddler of junk.

It follows that the U.S. has no interest in rescuing junk. And unlike Biden and Harris, who “won’t be satisfied until they send American kids over to Ukraine,” Trump knows that “the moms and dads of America don’t want their kids fighting Ukraine and Russia, and we’re not going to have our soldiers die across the ocean.”

It matters little that no one has even hinted at American soldiers being sent to Ukraine. The point is quite different, that no one, least of all Americans, should fall for Zelensky’s salesmanship and buy a jalopy from “the greatest salesman in history.”

Instead they should only (and indiscriminately) buy whatever Trump, the greatest genius in human history, is selling.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”