RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/02/dressing-for-the-role-zelensky-polonius-and-the-theater-of-politics/

I believe that most students, when first reading Hamlet, are inclined to regard Polonius as a sententious fool, present mostly for comic relief.

Sententious he may be. But it strikes me that most of his advice is wise and to the point.

Consider, to take one example, his famous speech to his son Laertes as the young man prepares to sail for France.

Is there a single item among Polonius’s “few precepts” that rings false?

I think that the speech, though pitched a bit high rhetorically, is full of good advice, from the bits at the beginning about holding one’s tongue to the concluding “to thine own self be true” admonition at the end.

Thinking about Volodymyr Zelensky’s performance in the Oval Office on Friday, it occurred to me that the Ukrainian president might profit by emulating certain of Polonius’s strictures. I am not thinking of Dane’s advice that one should “Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act.” Nor am I thinking of Polonius’s sage advice, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Both, to be sure, are sound prescriptions that the President of Ukraine might practice to his advantage.

But no: what impressed me as I digested the theater of the Zelensky Oval Office outing was something apparently more trivial. It revolved around what Polonius said about clothes, especially his observation that “the apparel oft proclaims the man.” Before the fireworks really started, at about minute 40 of the 50-minute Oval Office press conference when Zelensky and J.D. Vance got into it, someone asked why the President of Ukraine was not wearing a suit.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/trump-2-good-bad-ugly/

The 47th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is a man with a plan. His predecessor, the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, was not. Trump 45 portrayed himself throughout his first campaign as the embodiment of the electorate’s rage. That was effective in getting him elected and may have had the virtue of being true—but the role of rage-embodier provided little guidance when it came to the day-to-day task of being president. How were you to embody rage while at the same time repealing Obamacare, for example?

Trump 45 had no road map and no agenda. He had a vibe, and his first administration was an improvisation. Now, anyone who’s done (or watched) improv knows that moments of inspired brilliance can arise from a few disparate observations mashed together in an entirely new and unexpected way. But those unfortunate performers and audiences also know those indelible moments are usually outnumbered by the ones that go on too long, or are embarrassingly off-key, or just don’t work. The greatest improv of Trump 45 was the Abraham Accords, and a remarkable accomplishment they were. But then there was the bad improv, most notably the inconstant policy pronouncements and nightly briefings on the pandemic in 2020, which were so uncertain and discomfiting that they brought Trump 45 to its end.

Trump 47 ran for president for two years after the 2022 midterms, and the improviser was no more. His was a tight campaign and it had an overarching through line. The first, and most obvious, was that his successor had done a bad job and was so cognitively impaired, he wasn’t even really the president. That was the classic “binary choice” approach that every candidate running against a sitting president has to deploy: Do you want more of him or do you want to try me instead?

But it was more than that, and what we’ve seen in the first month of the Trump campaign is evidence. What Trump did, in every speech and every rally, was vow to take on and destroy two forces imperiling America’s present and condemning it to a dark future. The first was wokeness. The second was the weaponization of the law and the culture as a means of imposing wokeness on America. From the minute Trump took the oath of office on January 20, his determination to fulfill this vow—which unites even those parts of the right that remain skeptical or worse of Trump himself—has released a kind of primal political energy that has hit Washington with the force of one of those 2,000-pound bombs Joe Biden refused to send to Israel.

As I write, Trump has been president for three weeks. He has promulgated executive orders banning biological males from girls’ sports and recognizing two and only two genders. Other executive orders ended the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in government and extended the ban to institutions that receive federal funding. He has set loose the world’s richest man and most brilliant executive to root out waste in government, with no regard for prior political niceties—or niceties at all. He has targeted foreign aid, which collectively constitute the least popular doings of the federal government. He has sent illegal migrants who have committed criminal acts to Guantanamo. He has suspended government grants. He has moved American troops to the Southern border. He has threatened tariffs, then temporarily suspended them.

These are just the things he’s done that have popped into my head as I have been writing these sentences.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/02/28/well-zelenskyys-interview-with-bret-baier-was-interesting-n4937441

Just hours after being unceremoniously booted from the White House by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to salvage what was left of his diplomatic credibility in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier. And boy, was it a doozy.

Zelenskyy kicked things off with the expected platitudes, thanking President Trump and the American people for their support throughout Ukraine’s three-year war with Russia. “I was always very thankful from all our people. You helped us a lot from the very beginning… you helped us to survive. We are strategic partners, even in such tough dialogue,” Zelenskyy said—sounding like someone ready to capitulate to Trump to get this deal done.

But the winds changed when Baier pressed him on whether he owed Trump an apology for the Oval Office debacle. Instead of showing an ounce of contrition, Zelenskyy doubled down: “I respect president and I respect American people, and… I think that we have to be very open and very honest and I’m not sure that we did something bad.”

Not sure you did something bad? Is getting thrown out of the White House after a shouting match with the leader of the free world not a big enough clue? Ironically, Zelenskyy also expressed that some of the issues ought to have been discussed privately—which is exactly what JD Vance said. 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/01/trump-vance-and-the-new-new-world-order/

This past week, the venerable Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, used his column to declare the Trump administration and, by extension, the United States “the enemy of the West.” “Today,” Wolf wrote, “autocracies [are] increasingly confident,” and “the United States is moving to their side.” According to the subhead on the column, “Washington has decided to abandon…its postwar role in the world.” Meanwhile, Wolf cites the (in his estimation) august Franklin Roosevelt, as he complains that the United States “has decided instead to become just another great power, indifferent to anything but its short-term interests.”

The ironies here—as well as the historical ignorance—abound.

To start, one would imagine that Wolf, an educated man with two degrees from Oxford, might know that it was his countryman (and two-time Prime Minister), Henry John Temple (i.e. Lord Palmerston), who declared in a speech in the House of Commons that “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Wolf might also be expected to know that this statement was repeated—more famously and more pithily—by Henry Kissinger, perhaps the quintessential American diplomat in the supposedly vaunted postwar order. Kissinger, like Palmerston and Trump (apparently) understood that a nation that pursues anything other than its interests is foolish, faithless, and, in time, doomed.

What bothers Wolf, it would seem, is that American interests are diverging from British and continental European interests. That is unfortunate, but it is also more than likely the case that this divergence is the result of Britain and Europe’s abandonment of the principles, values, and ambitions the allies once shared, rather than the other way around. For example, Wolf criticizes the speech given by J.D. Vance in which the vice president defended the traditional American dedication to free speech and attacked the British and European rejection of that principle. Yet again, Wolf might be expected to know that the American preoccupation with this and all other negative rights is something the nation’s Founders inherited from their British forefathers. If the two nations now differ on the importance of this fundamental right, then that’s hardly Vance’s, Trump’s, or any other American’s fault.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/video-victor-davis-hanson-on-trump-zelensky-dust-up-at-oval-office/

In this new video, historian and pundit Victor Davis Hanson discusses the Trump-Zelensky dust-up on Friday at the White House, reflecting on how, “usually, in international diplomacy, the client doesn’t dictate to the patron.”

Don’t miss it!