Russian state TV can't get enough of Donald Trump. Nor, presumably, can Vladimir Putin

At the beginning of his first term, Donald Trump instructed his aides to treat every day as a reality show, with himself always as the victor. This style of operation permeated his entire presidency and influenced his interactions with foreign leaders.

Perhaps it was this "producer" mindset that led Trump to tell reporters at the end of a fiery and unusual Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, "This will be great television." However, this meeting ultimately devolved into an ugly verbal spat. Trump even stated, "I think it's a good thing for the American people to know what's going on. I think it's very important. That's why I let it go on so long."

It wasn't just the American people who were watching this classic episode of "The Trump Reality Show." The spectacle could easily be promoted as "Oval Office Cage Fight," like those pay-per-view boxing matches in Las Vegas. Soon, it was headlining news on Russian state television. Undoubtedly, viewers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Murmansk, and across the vast expanse of Russia would agree with some of the points made, as the Ukrainian president—the Kremlin's public enemy number one—was berated by Trump and his "attack dog" Vice President JD Vance.

According to a monitoring report of Russian broadcasts by *The New York Times*, "This catered to three years of Kremlin propaganda portraying Zelenskyy as a feckless ruler who would sooner or later exhaust the patience of his Western backers." This is precisely where we find ourselves just six weeks into the Trump 2.0 era: an American president producing programming beloved by Russian state television.

In this Trump era—and it is indeed the Trump era—Zelenskyy has undergone various transformations. He was once a comedian who rose to fame playing a caricature of the country's president on Ukrainian television, winning the presidential election in 2019. He was also a bit player in Trump's first impeachment, a drama centered on the president's attempt to extract political dirt on Joe Biden from Ukraine by freezing U.S. military aid. He is also a Churchillian war hero, becoming a symbol of his country's unexpectedly fierce resistance to Vladimir Putin, when the Russian president ordered a full-scale invasion in 2022.

At the end of the Oval Office squabble, he looked like the victim of a mugging. As tempers flared and decibels rose, it seemed like Trump and Vance were trying to diminish this larger-than-life figure. The lion of Kyiv was even portrayed as Joe Biden's poodle when Vance accused him of visiting an ammunition factory in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania during last year's presidential campaign. Afterward, Zelenskyy was told to leave the White House. A signing ceremony for a rare earth minerals agreement he was supposed to ink was canceled. So was a formal joint press conference with Trump (these "fireside chats" with reporters typically accompany formal press conferences with more journalists when international leaders visit the Oval Office). He wasn't exactly escorted out, but in terms of diplomatic niceties, his treatment came pretty close.

Was this premeditated? Did Trump and Vance carefully orchestrate this public spat beforehand (which, by the way, wasn't broadcast live from the Oval Office but rather through what's called a pool spray, when a reporter from the American network assigned to film such meetings that day rushes back to the press briefing room to share the video with all news outlets)? Was it an ambush? Watching the first 40 minutes of their meeting, it was fairly standard Trump fare. The president said he looked forward to signing a rare earth minerals agreement with Zelenskyy, which the Trump administration had pressured the Ukrainians to accept. When a reporter from "Real American Voice," a right-wing media outlet that supports MAGA, tried to needle Zelenskyy for not entering the Oval Office in a business suit, Trump jokingly defended him. The spat only began near the end of the meeting—when news channels might have been tempted to cut away, had they not been forewarned about what was coming (through this pool spray procedure, first-hand accounts make their way out of the Oval Office before the sound and pictures do).

Then, Trump's sidekick JD Vance was late jumping over the ropes into the boxing ring. What followed was the equivalent of a brawl at the end of an old episode of *The Jerry Springer Show*. All that was missing was Springer's famous wrap-up benediction: "Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other." Whether premeditated or not, the point is that Zelenskyy had been roughed up by the Trump administration long before he arrived in Washington. Trump even called the Ukrainian leader a "dictator," a word he was invited to use on Putin last week but chose not to. "I wouldn't use those words so easily," Trump responded. "I think we'll see what happens."

As shocking as it was to see Zelenskyy so publicly attacked, it would have been even more shocking—to use a contemporary cliché—to hear Trump utter similar words of criticism about Putin, one of the most savage aggressors in postwar Europe. Afterward, I spoke to one reporter who was present, who pointed out that the question that most infuriated Trump was a critical one about Russia from a Ukrainian journalist. So let's conduct a thought experiment, re-imagining that scene with the Russian president sitting next to the American president instead of Zelenskyy. Would JD Vance have dared to swing at Putin? Would Trump have yelled at the former KGB spy that he was "risking World War III?"

European leaders like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who embraced Zelenskyy on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street on Saturday in a show of solidarity after the Oval Office incident, are doing everything they can to shore up the transatlantic alliance, the cornerstone of European defense against the Soviet Union and Russia for the past 80 years. European nations now live in fear of abandonment by the United States. But in another jaw-dropping development, the incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz offered a sobering assessment last week, acknowledging the extent of Trump's disruption of the postwar model and consigning those 80 years of alliance to history. "My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can gradually achieve genuine independence from the United States," said Merz, leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party. "I never thought I would have to say something like this, but it is obvious that the Americans, at least this part of America, this administration, are to a large extent indifferent to the fate of Europe."

The attack on Zelenskyy in the Oval Office is a vivid and ugly sign of that indifference. With Trump in the Oval Office, the American president is no longer the leader of the free world. The question now is whether America truly belongs in what we describe as the West, that group of like-minded, value-sharing nations that includes Australia. Russian state television is reveling in it. So, presumably, is the Kremlin's Vladimir Putin.