‘Utterly Despicable’: Conservative Columnist Hammers Trump Blaming Ukraine For Russian Invasion
President Donald Trump kicked up pushback among conservatives with his latest comments about Ukraine having “started” a war with Russia.
“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today, I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said in response to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s concern he wasn’t included in peace negotiations. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
John Podhoretz, a speechwriter for late President Ronald Reagan, took to Commentary magazine on Tuesday to call Trump’s comments “utterly despicable.”
“You should never have started it. What madness, what cravenness, what repulsive factitiousness, is this?” the conservative columnist wrote. “Volodymyr Zelenskyy offended him by raising the perfectly logical problem of a negotiation that included him out, and so Trump began talking about Ukraine’s leader as though he were Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who hasn’t permitted a vote on his leadership in two decades.”
He argued Trump is blaming Ukraine for not “allowing” Russia to take it over.
“Trump is under no obligation to support Ukraine. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t,” Podhoretz wrote. “But doing so while accusing Ukraine of being the aggressor in the most unjustified, pitiless, and brutal war of aggression in our time is an act of infamy almost without parallel.”
Trump also faced criticism from the editorial board at the New York Post (where Podhoretz serves on the editorial board and serves as a columnist) which also blasted his comments about Ukraine as well as a proposal to claim profits from the country’s natural resources to pay back billions to the U.S. that went into the war effort.
“He didn’t start it, and he’s had no chance to end it except by surrendering to the blood-soaked invader: Whatever negotiating tactics Trump cares to use, turning the truth completely upside down ought to be beneath him,” they wrote.
The editorial board said Trump’s proposal would be “despicable.”
“To squeeze the war-crippled country for all we can, simply because we can, would be despicable,” they wrote.
