Donald Trump and JD Vance’s contentious meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy represents an “entirely new American posture,” Chris Cuomo said Saturday, adding that “it was over” the moment Vance warned Zelenskyy he should be grateful to the president.
“We must all agree,” Cuomo implored viewers at the beginning of his program, “no one has ever seen anything like what we saw in the Oval Office today.”
But somehow, he added, there are “wildly different interpretations of what happened.” And despite what happened at the meeting, “I’m not sure if we know that anything has really changed.”
The “first sign” that the meeting was not going to go well was the appearance of Vance, “who’s been a ghost” since Trump in inaugurated, Cuomo said. Vance was “clearly not” at the meeting as “a friend to Ukraine Zelenskyy.”
“Now look,” he said, “trusting Putin is something without precedent of success for America. “Think about it. Has he ever been an ally on everything? Anything. As a matter of fact, he did renege on the Minsk agreements and I lived how it happened.”
Cuomo then shared his experience in Ukraine as a reporter.
“I’m telling you where I was standing in Donetsk, Ukraine at that time when they shot that plane down. There were all these Russian separatists and intel officers working for Putin. Okay?” he explained. “They even had a guy there claiming to be the leader of the province of Donetsk, which does not exist … I interviewed the guy. He went by the name Borosky, but he worked for Putin.”
Vance “is missing the history” he continued, and “was also totally out of role here to take it to Zelenskyy” as if the trio were on “some fringe podcast debating the state of the Ukraine military.”
The president and vice president were “both playing bad cop” in an “airing of grievances” that Zelenskyy identified as “an ambush” Cuomo continued.
Trump and Vance are actually angry about the fallout surrounding a 2019 phone call from Trump to Zelenskyy, Cuomo said, — an act that led to his first impeachment (Trump is still the only federal official to be impeached twice). In a phone call coordinated by Alexander Vindman, Trump attempted to leverage US military aid to Ukraine if Zelenskyy agreed to investigate President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his role at a Ukrainian gas company. Trump was impeached for the first time on December 18, 2019.
