One of these days, people will figure out that it doesn’t pay to pick a fight, especially in public, with President Donald Trump. 

To that rather exclusive group of pugilistic opponents, it’s now okay to add Vice President J.D. Vance, a canny political scrapper from the “take no prisoners” school of political success. 

Oddly, after not only having been put in his place but also rather rudely “shown the door” on Friday the 28th, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, didn’t seem to have learned his lesson.  

More on that in a moment.

Nobody – not in the press corps, let alone Zelensky or his team of advisors – seemed to have anticipated J.D.’s role in taking on, then taking down, the recalcitrant Ukrainian president.  But upon reflection, it makes sense. 

Trump is term-limited to just four years in office, meaning that if the Orange Man’s legacy is to carry itself forward, it will require a Trump clone.  Ideally, that role could be played by the Crown Prince Trump had anointed just a few days after an assassin’s bullet made it clear that not even Donald Trump is guaranteed immortality.  Few insiders doubt that the Orange Man picked J.D. as his likely successor.  

So far, the Veep is showing his ability to hold his own in situations that up to now only the president could pull off with grace and aplomb.  Should Vance become the heir apparent to the American throne, the progress Trump has made so far could be institutionalized for at least another eight years.  That is what it will take for our president to leave a lasting legacy, which is what America needs and what Donald Trump most certainly wants.

But I digress.

After having been given the bum’s rush out of the White House, Ol’ Vova was given a gold-plated opportunity to kiss and make up during his scheduled, exclusive interview with Bret Baier on Fox News.  This opportunity took place at 6 p.m. Eastern, just a few hours after the Ukrainian president was unceremoniously ejected from his disastrous meeting with The Donald, after which Trump took Air Force One to Mar-A-Lago, 857 miles away from a possible re-run of the morning’s meeting. 

Volodya’s Oval Office departure represented an ignominious retreat, one witnessed by the press corps.  However, at 6 p.m., Zelensky received a blatantly obvious lead-in from Baier, a seasoned political reporter.  This first question all but invited Volodymyrko to apologize.

When asked if he owed Trump an apology, the Ukrainian president began his response by saying, “No.”  If he said anything after that, almost nobody on planet Earth heard him.  They all knew that no amount of equivocation could take away the fact that “No” is a complete sentence – one that Number Forty-Seven is not used to hearing. 

Trump quickly confirmed that there was no point in even thinking about a new meeting until and unless Vova not only apologized but made it clear that his only interest was in, as Trump put it in a tweet on Truth Social, working for a fast-tracked peace.

After three presidential campaigns and more than four years in office – and four years out of office before his recent landslide win – Trump must feel bemused that so many people out there still don’t know that the only sane way of approaching The Donald is to take him at his word. 

Of course, there is a lot of hyperbole and even whimsey surrounding his words, but when things get serious, as in his desire for Peace (he always capitalizes it) between Russia and Ukraine, you better listen very carefully to what he says.  Because he means it.  Nothing else about that war is really important to him than Peace.  Now.  

Unlike America, most of NATO is eager to keep draining Russia militarily – at least as long as they don’t have to do any of the fighting or underwrite most of the costs involved. 

However, Trump has made it clear that Russia is a nuclear power with an arsenal unmatched by any other nation … other than America.  Any kind of war with Russia – especially one like this one, where they lost bigly at first, then once that war stalemated, they kept losing more troops and equipment than their sometimes-shaky economy will allow – has the potential to go nuclear at a moment’s notice.  

Vlad the Impaler has already floated the idea that he might be inclined to launch a few tactical nuclear weapons at key Ukrainian military or economic targets, just to pave the way for a renewed Russian offensive.  Not that one will then be necessary, unless Ukraine’s “nuclear friends” in NATO are willing to trade nukes with Russia. 

Oddly, if they do so, the most likely targets will be in what was once owned-and-occupied by Ukraine’s industrial area along Russia’s border.

In fact, it seems that not only has Volodya never grasped the real power of the Russian tac-nukes, but NATO has never really believed that Putin would open the nuclear bottle and unleash its djinn.  Nor have they considered that once it’s out of the bottle, that atomic djinn, like the contents of Pandora’s box, can’t be put back into place.  However, President Trump – always the supreme pragmatist, as well as his junior partner, Veep J.D. Vance, a Marine combat veteran – appear to have a firm grasp on the concept that if he’s pushed to the wall, militarily or economically, Putin has little to lose by unleashing a tac-nuke or two, or twelve.  Meanwhile, our NATO allies, especially those in central Europe, seem to have forgotten the damaging radiation Chernobyl managed to visit on them, back around forty years ago.

Where did Zelensky go wrong?  He assumed – because that was the only way he’d have a chance of winning the war at the peace talks – that Trump shared his commitment to hamstring the Russian Bear. 

This was based on his mistaken belief that America was Ukraine’s largest and most powerful ally, a conclusion he probably reached because Biden gave him around $350 billion in unrestricted military and economic aid, beginning almost from the moment that Russia crossed the international boundary it shared with Ukraine. 

But that mistaken belief could not stand in the face of Trump’s landslide victory over Biden’s “mini-me,” Kamala Harris.  He’s always had a pragmatic view of Europe and Asia and has no interest in America under his command becoming embroiled in a land-war in Eurasia, let alone a nuclear land-war.

Trump’s interest – and, arguably America’s interest – is to end this war quickly, then to re-engage both Ukraine and Russia in reciprocal economic trade, where everybody wins.  While he knows that Russia started this war, he’s got no “skin in the game,” no emotional need to make Russia pay more than it already has for “Vlad’s Folly,” that unwinnable land-war.

Having been warned by Russia’s successful incursion into Crimea in 2014, Vova had been able to field an army that was better trained – though not necessarily better equipped – than the Russian horde which crossed his border three years ago. 

Many of Vlad’s soldiers were new recruits, some sent to the front without even the preparation of boot camp.  However, to sustain that fighting force, knowing that his foot-soldiers would always be outnumbered, Volodya needed a crap-ton of state-of-the-art military supplies to offset Vlad’s advantage.  This load-out of advanced weapons had to come directly or indirectly from America.  Which has now made President Trump the gatekeeper.

Of course, early on, NATO was fairly generous in doling out its own stockpiles of modern weapons. They did this secure in the knowledge that America was bound by the NATO Treaty to defend any and all NATO nations.  So Ukraine’s armed forces soon began using state-of-the-art weapons – British tanks, German jets and lots of weapons NATO countries had which were American-made.  So when Biden began directly sending cannon and artillery shells, tanks and armored personnel carriers, jet planes and their spectacular weapons, and even man-portable – MANPAD – air defense systems and anti-tank rockets, many Ukrainian soldiers and pilots already knew how to use them with deadly effect.

However, all those weapons came via Sleepy Joe Biden.  Trump, it seems, has little interest in providing unlimited amounts of state-of-the-art weapons – with no strings attached – as well as hundreds of billions of dollars to keep Ukraine’s economy and war production industries moving forward.  Zelensky may now realize this, but it’s clear he didn’t have a clue when he went into that fateful meeting with Trump and Vance … and the American Presidential Press Corps.  

Ukraine has a few choices, and Trump spelled them out.  Zelensky, being a president by fiat – he used the military emergency to avoid stepping down when his elected term in office wrapped up … so much for “democracy” – he’s not going to step down.  Unless I miss my guess, a coup d'état seems unlikely. That means he’ll either have to break bread with Trump and Vance, or he’ll have to fight the war without further American support.  

As Trump might have said, “good luck with that.”

A frequent contributor to American Thinker going back to 2006, Ned Barnett, a professional at marketing, promoting and selling his clients’ books, is also a military historian specializing in 20th and 21st Century warfare.  He is currently working on a series of novels – roughly half a million words – about the air-war in the Pacific, 1941-42.  This group of books will be released starting later this year.  A long-time political operative – including three state-level Presidential campaigns as Media and Strategy Director, as well as Senate, House, Gubernatorial and state elections – he is currently writing a book on How To Win An Election.  He can be reached at nedbarnett51@gmail.com or 702-561-1167.

Image: DataBase Center for Life Sciences (DBCLS), via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed