Zelensky dresses up and avoids dressing-down

Not since Barack Obama held a press conference dressed as the Man from Del Monte has a suit played such a critical role in US politics. But there it was, after the spring press conference incident, President Zelensky arrived in Washington, DC wearing a suit. The “YMCA”-loving Trump administration is hardly batting off the accusations of campness given its fixation with menswear. Still, Zelensky came, as did all of Europe. 

All the handshakes went off without a hitch, although the size difference meant that the visuals were slightly more redolent of vaudeville than high diplomatic drama. Zelensky handed a letter from his wife to the First Lady, thanking her for her intervention on behalf of Ukraine’s missing children. During Trump’s monologues on foreign policy he has often let slip that his wife has been a driving influence in favor of a more compassionate attitude towards Ukraine. Whether the Secret Service can deliver it to the right Melania remains to be seen.

Trump specializes in the diplomatic theater of the absurd: Samuel Beckett meets Metternich meets the cast of Jersey Shore. He duly boasted of solving “six wars in six months,” including in a place he called the Republic of the Condo – which sounds like a pseudonym for Florida. This was a press conference through the looking glass. 

Meanwhile the President kept his audience guessing: “We have great people up here,” he said, gesturing at the assembled press pack. “We also have terrible people.” Nobody does scattered insults quite like Trump – he makes the Gatling Gun look like a close-range precision missile. 

He treated Zelensky to a long and very involved monologue about the virtues of paper ballots – by far the lengthiest answer of the day. It was a bit like one of those sections you have to skip in a Victorian novel, as when Anthony Trollope does one of his three-chapter sequences about a fox hunt or spends 100 pages waxing lyrical about checks. 

In the midst of this, the President insisted that only America uses paper ballots. For all his comedy it is worth remembering that Trump includes provable untruths in most of his monologues. Of course it isn’t only America which uses mail-in ballots. As ever, Trump’s press conference was like watching a mime show. It was wild, confusing and seemingly irrelevant at times, and yet when it was over you had a sense that you’d seen something impressive.

All in all, as good as it could be expected for Ukraine. J.D. Vance – unusually silent today – had apparently been neutered and, for all the Trumpian weirdness, the exchanges yielded a more concrete level of support than last time. On security, said Trump, “there’s going to be a lot of help, we will be involved.” 

For now, at least, it seemed President Zelensky had figured out the winning formula; nod, smile and say as little as possible.