Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office

“Everywhere we live in a universe strangely similar to the original – things are doubled by their own scenario”

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Let us be honest about something for once”
“When somebody talks about honesty, that means they want to take off your last pair of pants”

One shady oligarch to another, Servant of the People

On February 28th, Donald Trump, JD Vance and Volodymyr Zelensky met in the Oval Office to discuss a ceasefire. The conversation escalated into a confrontation between Trump and Zelensky, in which Trump defended his “America-first” foreign policy in a shockingly brazen display of American influence and reality-TV bravado. The conversation has been uploaded to Youtube by The White House, and continues to echo through ongoing ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine. This event is characteristic of the Trump era: the dissipation of power into empty images of itself, the ghostly recurrence of familiar tropes, and the diffusion of the real into the spectacular and hyperbolic.

Parody? Satire? Hyperbole?

Servant of the People is a Ukrainian political-comedy-drama from 2015. The show stars Volodymyr Zelensky as Vasily Petrovych Goloborodko, a history teacher who is elected president after he is caught ranting about government complacency in a viral clip.

Vasily is an everyman. He lives in a small house with his parents and niece, he burns his coffee in the mornings, and his campaign is run by supportive students. He stands in contrast to the inhuman and autonomous political machine around him: after his election, he is rushed through suits, watches, and green-screened photoshoots with construction workers like a car on an assembly line. In a daze, his appendages are coated with resin to make duplicates for the national museum and his profile is impressed in clay to be reprinted on coins.

Tonally, the show sits somewhere in between Veep and The West Wing — lightly satirical but fundamentally reverent of democratic political process. Much of the comedy and suspense comes from Vasily’s lack of political decorum, which keeps him at odds with the bureaucratic old-guard.

Servant of the People is an essentially liberal political fantasy: Vasily is a political outsider and an earnest representative of the people, but he is willing to play by the rules to get things done. At one point, he tells his students about a Japanese peasant who spoke his mind to the emperor and demanded (through a string of vulgarities) that taxes be lowered for his province. In response, the emperor cuts off the peasants tongue and grants his request. While the malevolent political elite see truth as a political tool (quoted above), Vasily believes that “the truth, whatever it may be, remains nevertheless true.”

Vasily’s earnesty and individuality is constantly contested by predetermined roles and political expectation/convention, but he appears to maintain his sense of self. His political victories are a sort of unveiling: he exposes corruption so that the power of truth can prevail.

In 2019, Zelensky won his bid for president with the backing of the Servant of the People Party (an intentional namesake). Since then, he has kept true to the image of Vasily. He makes public appearances in sweaters and t-shirts, and talks often about uprooting corruption and political elites (in a somewhat meta turn, he has worked to increase competition in Ukrainian TV broadcasting to levy against the influence of oligarchs).

Trump has cultivated a different sort of image. While Zelensky plays the everyman, Trump plays a hyperbolic version of the American dream fulfilled. His numerous failed business ventures have not undermined his status as The American businessman — an image stamped and sealed by the sheer power of the TRUMP signature/logo. Per Alan Shapiro[^1]:

“The mythology of Trump was born during the New York City gilded 1980s, the era of Ivan Boesky and Gordon Gecko greed and Wall Street insider trading. Donald Trump plastered the name Donald Trump everywhere he could. He of the golden toilet, he the playboy ladies’ man, the casino owner, the entrepreneur of the opulence of the billion-dollar Atlantic City Taj Majal gambling and Entertainment Paradise-complex..”
Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction, Alan Shapiro

Like Zelensky, Trump evidently appeals to a sort of popular sentiment. But while Zelensky represents a sort of rational liberalism, Trump champions a politics of spectacle.

It is almost benign to call Trump the first postmodern president. From entertainer to politician, Trump’s rise to power has solidified an American era of politics as entertainment (specifically, reality television). The sanctity and self-seriousness of political media has been exposed as an outdated aesthetic: from Stormy Daniels and the Access Hollywood tapes to January 6th and claims of election fraud, Trump has elevated the status of mainstream media to that of the tabloid — to much fanfare.

Does Trump believe the things that he is saying? Is he lying or misinformed? Is he a narcissist or an ideologue? Is he simply playing the same character that he did on The Apprentice? In the words of Baudrillard:

“All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of facts does not put an end to the vertigo of interpretation” [^2]
Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard

To try and hold Trump to objective standards of reality is to misunderstand the media-apparatus that surrounds him. While fact-checkers scramble to disprove claims about Haitian immigrants eating dogs, your next-door neighbor swears that he saw it happen last week. Past means for discerning truth from simulation are blown asunder. The doubt that Trump has cast on traditional institutionalized news media has proven its “truths” to be the product of social consensus, not unlike the shifting and spectacular realities of the tabloid.

Both Trump and Zelensky have flowed seamlessly from performances (and satirizations!) of power to positions of (ostensibly) real power. And yet, neither can take full (or even partial) credit in the creation of themselves — both are the product of writers rooms and collections of tropes, at best capable of imitating their own public persona.

Are they still performing? Can the performance end? Where would authenticity begin?

Zelensky, servant of the people, nervously presents Trump with a folder of images depicting increasingly violent conditions faced by Ukrainian prisoners of war. Trump remains utterly unfazed, and solicits a hand-selected crowd of journalists to ask him questions. Zelensky makes expected appeals to the United State’s political obligations to NATO and the protection of liberal democracies, and Trump responds as if he is speaking to a contestant on The Apprentice.

In a telling moment, Trump is asked how he wants to go down in history and if he sees himself in any historical figures.

“I’d say George Washington, Abraham Lincoln… I would say I’m far superior to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln [some muffled laughs can be heard from the crowd]. You know I’m only kidding, right? Because when I say that, the fake news is going to go wild. They’re going to say he considers himself to be better than Washington. But you never know… I don’t compare myself to anybody, I’m here to do a job.”

The irony is initially undetectable. In Trump, Zelensky’s (performed) liberal sincerity is reflected, distorted, and parodied. Trump is at once serious and mocking, both self-aware and lacking a clear self. He is the ultimate floating signifier: great president, jester, businessman, force of nature.

Zelensky can’t keep up. Just as soon as he has pinned down one Trump, another appears to take his place. Questions of material commitment are given inconsistent and mostly indiscernible answers that gesture towards a wide array of political outcomes but commit to none. At the end the only discernible outcome was the creation of content — Trump turns to the camera and remarks: “this is going to be great television.”

Where has the power gone?

But what is actually at stake?

Zelensky twitches nervously, sitting on pins and needles as Trump thoughtlessly dismisses the direness of the situation. His anxiety is so palpable that it seems to render questions of authenticity or performance distasteful.

Following the meeting, Trump temporarily suspended aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine. The suspension has since been lifted, and a ceasefire agreement is (as of writing) yet to be reached. While it would be easy to chalk this up as a warning shot and move on, there are two threads worth following.

First, the inconsistency of Trump’s stated position on material aid prompts a deeper reflection on the principles underlying the MAGA “ideology.” Is it an ideology? The word ideology suggests a relatively consistent set of totalizing beliefs, which are certainly not apparent. Alan Shapiro reflects on whether or not Trump is a fascist:

“Classical fascism works on the Führer principle and a strong and stable set of beliefs[^3]… For Trump, these aspects become variable and “anything goes.” He changes his mind every day and has no goals or agenda other than greatness and freedom. The energetic force of fascism persists, but without fixed ideological reference points. This parodies fascism since absolute truth is transferred to the double-system of the empty self-referential signifiers and the arbitrary signifieds.”
Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction, Alan Shapiroto

Building on this understanding, Trump’s exercises of power are more concerned with being photographed and documented than they are with achieving a specific political end. His political aims for mass-deportation feel best articulated in the handcuff-ASMR video posted on the POTUS Instagram.

Second, Trump’s ability to produce or exercise any meaningful power divorced from the interests of capital (lobbyists, donors, shareholders, oligarchs) is dubious at best. Most obviously, his stated desire for increased tariffs and vague promises to bring peace to Gaza have been immediately tempered by external influence. More subtly, the forces of production have developed globally to such a point that the capital allows for and even demands the veneer of real power politics that remain unthreatening to global production.

At one point, JD Vance seems to suggest that it is a president’s actions (not their words) that hold power. These remarks feel strange in the context of the incoherent action that has followed the conversation. One is tempted to look back at John F. Kennedy, to remember how the Bay of Pigs invasion was halted by a single phone call. Where has this power gone?

My attempts to reify this event feel impossible. While the conversation has been turned into a concrete text (by the 50-minute long Youtube upload), the beginning and end of this text will be constantly re-litigated. Hours after the meeting ended, Zelensky was on FOX news re-asserting the terms of his relationship with Trump.

It is unclear if this event was pure and complete or totally non-existent. It is especially unclear how US foreign aid will be impacted, how the global exchange of capital will be disrupted by Russian territorial gains.

It feels today as if political reality (more broadly, external reality) is beyond meaningful grasp. I sink my teeth into a moment that is already weeks old, trying to trace its endless echoes and refractions, and I find that I cannot escape the same process of endless re-interpretation and litigation.

Bibliography

Shapiro, Alan N. “Jean Baudrillard and the Donald: Is Trump a Fascist or is He the Parody of Fascism?“. Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction: Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839472422-011

Baudrillard, Jean “Precession of Simulacra” Simulacra and Simulation

The White House, President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Oval Office, Feb. 28, 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajxSWocbye8.

[^1]: Alan Shapiro is a media-studies scholar, and a lecturer at Arts and Design University of Offenbach, Germany. His work, specifically Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction, will be drawn on at length. [^2]: This sense of vertigo is not helped by JD Vance, who could be understood as an exceptionally cynical American foil to Zelensky. Vance’s play at being the American everyman is utterly unconvincing, but nonetheless serves as an exigence for his place in the Trump administration. Though Vance represents a more unremarkable and familiar breed of American sell-out, his presence nevertheless serves to present MAGA as, in the words of Steinbeck, the vanguard party of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” I would talk about Vance more, but he is not seen in frame until about halfway through the press conference and a bit outside of the scope of this reflection. [^3]: While I don’t necessarily agree with Shapiro’s assessment about the stability of fascist beliefs on race, nationalism, territorial possession, etc., the point stands that Trump’s platform positions, enemies, and positive beliefs are exceptionally hard to pin down relative to somebody like Hitler.