A 15-MINUTE meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky before the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday made for an extraordinary picture, which you can see here.
It is a typically Trump moment. People will say it is all staged, all theatre, all nonsense. In reality, it is part of what Trump is, what Trump does.
It is the world’s most unjustly vilified man doing everything in his power to stop a war. And doing it by talking directly, one on one, with perhaps the world’s most unjustly lionised hero. There has not been an effort towards peace such as this in living memory.
Why do I think an image like this means more than all the hate-filled headlines, all the progressive contempt, and all the equally virulent loathing spilled out from mainstream Conservatives who fetishise Nato and Ukraine with the same kind of unbalanced worship that their progressive globalist counterparts exhibit?
It’s no accident, after all, that the mainstream ‘right-wing’ media and political class is just as contemptuous of Trump’s efforts to force an end to the bloody slaughter in Ukraine as Democrat and supposedly ‘left-wing’ commentators have been. It’s similar to the way war-hungry neocons spanned the Republican and Democrat benches, or the way this parity of Uniparty interest was right there at the beginning of the path to this unnecessary war.
John McCain and Victoria Nuland, one Republican, one Democrat, both neocons, were both present in Ukraine as the 2014 Maidan uprising and colour revolution unfolded, both spending USAID money. The CIA effort to set Ukraine and Russia on the path of war eventually succeeded when Putin finally tired of Western interference, Ukrainian assaults on ethnic Russians in the eastern regions, and the emergingly obvious way in which Globalist and neo-con interests were setting Ukraine up as a staging post for a coup in Russia itself:
The context to remember here has multiple important elements:
- The Ukrainian revolutions to remove the Yanukovyich government were originally called ‘Euromaidan’ because they centred on the elected Ukrainian government wishing to maintain neutrality between the West and Russia and refusing to sign a pre-EU membership pathway accord;
- Both US main parties had their strongest neocons in place financially backing the uprising;
- The money to ‘support Democracy’ was actually being spent to fund an uprising and revolution against an elected government;
- Nuland was later caught picking a new Ukrainian government over the phone like a person ordering a pizza;
- Everything since, including the Russian final exasperated invasion, depends on this coup. The Yenukovyich government had a clear policy of being as friendly as possible to the West and Russia, which meant not breaking Russian red lines on security with EU and NATO membership;
- We have since seen long-lasting suspicions of USAID being a CIA front and ‘pro-democracy spending’ being ‘funding coups and violent uprisings’ effectively confirmed by DOGE exposures of the funding trails and lack of accountability and legitimate description in that funding.
Mainstream media of course was throughout plugged into the same network. Mainstream media was taking funding from USAID and similar neocon and CIA-controlled misappropriations of US State spending, and funnelling that into its reporting positions and the kind of propaganda it was spreading, including of course the growing Russia narratives that ran alongside the sudden sanitisation of Ukraine’s Neo Nazi problem and Ukraine’s exceptional levels of internal corruption.
All of which explains why from 2014 onwards Ukrainian oligarch-directed governments became increasingly belligerent towards the Russian-favouring regions, and increasingly determined on a path they knew the Russians would eventually take as a level of threat that had to be met with armed force. Zelensky and his Ukrainian oligarch handlers, and all post-2014 Ukrainian governments, were emboldened in outraging Russian security concerns as recklessly as possible precisely because they knew that they had US neocon and CIA backing which had, after all, removed less Russophobic elements from power.
But what this also explains is the continuing extreme hatred of Trump’s efforts at peace today. Especially in mainstream media.
Ukraine is a convergence point between the key concerns of ‘right-wing’ corrupt Westerners and ‘left-wing’ corrupt Westerners. In the US this is clearer than anywhere else, but applies in the UK as well. The ‘right-wing’ corrupt media voice or political ‘leader’ serves the military industrial complex and has been trained to ideologically worship the post-1945 consensus Nato, the false lessons of WWII, a fake kind of patriotism that is fine with radically non-national interests or internal societal collapse so long as the Big Institutions are respected, and a polite horror of active, living nationalism (which must be Nazism!) while cheerleading for pointless war as a substitute for actual patriotism.
These people never oppose degeneracy, decline, tyranny or woke and progressive insanity at home. They offer subservience rather than defiance to transnational bodies that do not have national interests at heart at all, but do so wrapped in their national flag.
What a situation like Ukraine offers is vast opportunities for grift, fraud, diverted public funds, bureaucratic empire building, shady business deals, and total social tinkering on a global scale reconfiguring the world as Progressive Paradise regardless of how many bodies litter the road to that promised land.
Peace offers none of these opportunities for both power accumulation and self enrichment, for both ideological experiment and transfer of funds, any more than concentrating on the lives of your own people and events in your own nation in sane ways does.
And this is why in the UK for instance we find Guardian ‘left-wing’ journalist Jonathan Freedland telling us how monstrous Trump is for pursuing peace. How he is a gangster because he will talk to Putin. How he is a friend of dictators for the same reason. And at the same time we find ‘right-wing’ journalist and former politician Daniel Hannan, or a hundred other ‘right-wing’ hacks particularly in the Telegraph, saying exactly the same – that Trump is a monster for pursuing peace, an appeaser in the mode of Neville Chamberlain, an impolite horror destroying the norms of diplomacy.
Both Zelensky and Putin have insulted Trump as well during all this. He’s had Zelensky try to corner and humiliate him in the White House, try to emotionally blackmail him and force a blank chequebook level of support. And Putin must know as well how bad for Trump his recent breaking of a Trump-mediated ceasefire looks. And what has Trump got as thanks for trying to introduce some sanity?
The right calling him an appeaser, and the Left calling him a dictator, and both of them mocking his sincere pursuit of peace while they seriously slaver for more war. Neither Right nor Left with a care for Ukrainian corpses, Russian corpses, or potential Western corpses. All of them cynical, manipulative, dishonest, but sanctimonious, pious, and respectable at the same time. All of them casting this incredible, determined, courageously moral striving towards an end of corrupt slaughter as morally inferior to themselves, when it is infinitely morally superior to them all.
And here he is again, the hated Peacemaker, doing all he can no matter how thankless it is. Grabbing another chance to bring peace instead of slaughter, and being called a monster and a fool by those who are monstrously foolish themselves.
Doing what no purely corrupt person does, which is speaking to both sides. Doing what for instance a Jeremy Corbyn never did in the case of the IRA or Hamas, which is speaking to all sides rather the just the terrorists. Doing what nobody on those USAID missions ever did, which is talking to all sides rather than siding with one. Doing what nobody in the mainstream media does, talking to both sides and urging the exact same thing.
Stop the slaughter.
Yes, and doing more genuine good, attempting more genuine good, than the late Pope or every pious critic in TDS frenzy has ever done either.
Whether peace comes or not it is an effort that Trump alone is making.
Look at that picture in St Peter’s Basilica again, and know what you witness.
This article appeared in Jupplandia on April 26, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
