A Real-Life Pro Wrestling-Style Contract Signing

It's already a full heel turn. God help us all if this turns into a death match.

I know; enough digital ink has been spilled over last Friday’s debacle at the White House. It was a real-life publicity mugging that oddly resembled a contract signing work straight from a pro wrestling storyline, all we needed was a bewildered play-by-play announcer asking, “What is JD Vance doing here?!?”

Jonah Goldberg recommended that we watch the entire Oval Office press conference in his ad hoc post at The Dispatch, so I did. All 50 excruciating minutes of it. And it’s important to do so, rather than just skipping to the theater of the absurd at the end, replete with verbal steel chair.

If you go to the C-SPAN program page instead of watching the YouTube embed above, you’ll see some interesting things. First, at the 9:32 mark, a chyron appears at the bottom of the screen: JOINT NEWS CONFERENCE BETWEEN PRES. TRUMP & PRES. ZELENSKY HAS BEEN CANCELLED. The Washington Post reported the cancellation happened after the Oval Office incident; this is inaccurate, if not a flat-out lie by the newspaper that just forcibly removed the voice box from its op-ed section:

(Curious what the 6:48 a.m. version said; Wayback doesn’t have anything until 3/1.)

Nothing had erupted in the Oval Office to that point. There were some quibbles, and Trump made several those faces where he was clearly irritated (as Kamala Harris did numerous times when she rhetorically curbstomped him in the debate, or when Right Rev. Marianne Budde spoke in a genuine prophetic mode to him shortly after the inauguration) or he pooped himself (why not both?). Brian Glenn hadn’t even asked his outhouse bat-grade suit question. But things, for 39 of 49 minutes, remained cordial at best, and that’s being generous.

That’s when Vance pulled out the steel chair. Or, more to the point, went into business for himself, cutting a pipebomb promo. This was not planned: Trump said he could be the toughest human being ever (while doing the weird magnetic hands thing he does whenever he knows he’s lying), asked for one more question and Vance stopped him to start the melee.

Again, what is he even doing here? The vice president shouldn’t be second chair for this. If anything, Marco Rubio should be there on the immediate flank as Secretary of State; perhaps Vance is hanging around in the background. Whatever makes sense. The way things have been going, de facto President Elon Musk should have been lurking with one or two of his human shield kids. But this felt like a desperate middle child coloring on the walls for attention, or in this case, obliterating what little standing the United States has left in the free world and making the open-and-shut case that he should never be allowed anywhere near a foreign dignitary ever again.

This wasn’t even America First, it was Vance First. And I think that deeply irritated Trump, which added even more fuel to the kindling.

When Zelensky pushed back with a reasonable and factual dismissal of Vance’s nonsense, you can see Trump’s annoyance with being supplanted by the opportunist VP, who doubles down both on his bad argument and Trump’s nerves:

Zelensky clearly doesn’t have time for this. He’s lived three years of war, even more under the shadow of Russia’s eye toward expansion and he knows the inner workings of recent Ukrainian diplomacy. And this dude with eyeliner is going to come in and lecture him about, well, anything?

Then we get to the spark, which I found to be most interesting, because Trump doesn’t lose it until Zelensky says this, courtesy the AP’s transcript: First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean and don’t feel now. But you will feel it in the future. …

That’s where Trump loses it. Not at ingratitude, or even at disrespect. It was when Zelensky suggested — not improperly! — this quasi- if not de facto appeasement would have ramifications beyond Trump’s immediate, transactional, reptilian thinking that we get the blow-up. Zelensky extrapolated the logic to a place Trump either hadn’t considered or didn’t want it to go.

This underscores and builds upon Harris’ point last October: that he is so easily manipulated, not only by flattery as was noted and demonstrated then, but in how he is readily betrayed by his own emotional fragility, as Zelensky inadvertently showed us Friday.

And everything that’s been happening to the federal government since January 20 has been geared to consolidate more power and control to this man-child who apparently can’t handle the perception of being upstaged.

The problem is that this isn’t a storyline, and it won’t be settled at some pay-per-view. In every conceivable way, this is now a shoot match. And we’re all in the ring.