Thomas Friedman, a prominent New York Times columnist, described in an article on Saturday what happened in President Donald Trump’s Oval Office on Friday as “a clearly planned ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance” and that it was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of the United States, stressing that in a major war in Europe, “our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invader.”

“You want an analogy? Imagine if when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House on February 4, Trump and Vance told him that the war with Hamas had gone on too long, too many lives had been lost and it had cost America too much money, so it was time for Bibi and the Israeli people to make a deal with the aggressor Hamas,” Friedman says.

“Russia did to Ukraine on February 24, 2022, what Hamas did to Israel on October 7, 2023 — a surprise invasion, followed by murder and sexual violence to wreak havoc on another country and its society,” Friedman says. “Trump stood 110 percent with Bibi against Hamas, and now he stands 110 percent with Putin against Zelensky and Ukraine.”

“It is difficult to express the extent of the collapse of American foreign policy,” Friedman continues. “We have stood for freedom and those who fight for it around the world. There have been times when isolationist forces among our citizens have held us back and we have had to be persuaded. There have been times when, in support of the larger cause of freedom, against dangerous enemies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we have had to temporarily ally ourselves with dictators. But I cannot recall a single time when an American president has declared that the democratically elected leader of a freedom-preserving country was a ‘dictator’ who started a war with his neighbor—when it was the evil dictator next door who actually started the war.”

“If you listen to Trump, everything we’ve done for Ukraine is pure beauty; it’s like we have no real stake in its fate or the triumph of freedom there,” says Friedman, who has consistently defended the need to continue the war in Ukraine and the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians. “We have no real stake in the fact that Ukraine protects the European Union — a giant, pro-American alliance of free markets and free people.”

“Trump doesn’t care at all what happens to the EU or Ukraine,” Friedman concludes his piece, expressing his frustration. “All that matters is that Zelensky says ‘thank you’ louder and louder, and signs us into his war of survival on a generation’s worth of Ukraine’s mineral wealth.” “This is a complete misrepresentation of American foreign policy that every president since World War I has pursued. Dear Americans, we are in completely uncharted waters, led by a president who—well, I don’t believe he’s a Russian agent, but he certainly plays a Russian agent on TV.”