Zelensky picks a fight with Trump and you have to wonder why?

At this point Trump could be his best friend or his worse enemy, he seems to prefer the latter.

Marco Rubio:

I was very upset because we had a conversation with Zelensky, the vice president and I, the three of us, and we discussed this issue about the mineral rights, and we explained to them, look, we want to be a joint venture with you, not because we're trying to steal from your country but because we think that is actually a security guarantee. If we're your partner in an important economic endeavor, we get to get paid back some of the money that taxpayers have given, close to $200 billion, and now, we have a vested interest in the security of Ukraine. And he said, sure we want to do this deal, the only thing is, I need to run it through my legislative process. 

I read two days later that Zelensky is out there saying, "I rejected the deal, I told them no way, that we're not doing that." Well, that's not what happened in that meeting. So you start to get upset at somebody, we're trying to help these guys. One of the points the president made in his messaging is not that we don't care about Ukraine, but Ukraine is on another continent. It doesn't directly impact the daily lives of Americans. We care about because it has implications for our allies and ultimately for the world, but there needs to be some level of gratitude about this, and when you don't see and you see him out there accusing the president of living in a world of disinformation, that's highly, very counterproductive, and I don't need to explain it to you or anybody else Donald Trump, President Trump is not the kind of person who is going to sit there and take that. 

Zelensky is little more than another Eastern European thug. A bully for all practical purposes who was able to bully Biden and his administration into a couple hundred billion dollars of support. He was clearly attempting to use the same behavior on Trump and it backfired, at least from a standpoint of garnering additional assistance from the United States. Unlike Biden, Trump doesn't care what Europe or the international press thinks of him.

That being said, the current Trump Zelensky feud may end up pushing Europe to take a bigger stake in all of this. The argument from Trump appears to be, if Europe wants to push back on a peace agreement that cedes territory to Russia, then they can pony up anything from here on out to garner that result. But in the meantime, we are going to create a pathway to peace that might not make everyone happy.

Rumor has it that Europe was considering just that. They are considering putting together some form of plan that would both fund the end of the war and Ukrainian clean up. But getting Europe to step in for the United States is a big ask for them, considering how little more of them spend on their own defense. What would be needed for Ukraine to actually strike back at this point in the war and push Russia out of these territories is likely more than the combined yearly military spending for most of these countries. Without US assistance, do they even have the ability?

More to the point, how far with the Europeans go to defy the bad orange man, who appears now dead set on ending this thing in a manner that basically reflects the score of the war as it exists today. Trump seems to have no interest in changing the dynamics first and negotiating peace down the road. He wants this done now, and if it doesn't happen then someone other than the US needs to step up and fund Ukraine. I think that is a reasonable strategy at this point.