"First I will meet with Putin, I will meet with Zelensky. They both have weaknesses, they both have strengths. In 24 hours, the war will be over," this was Donald Trump's peace plan, announced almost two years ago, on May 10, 2023, live on CNN, during his first appearance on a national American TV channel (except Fox News) since he left the White House without waiting for Biden's inauguration and headed home to his Florida villa, Mar-a-Lago. This broadcast, an hour of an unexpectedly warm bath for Donald Trump, brought down on CNN a huge outcry from the liberal American community. The explanation handed down from the top, voiced by the channel's stars like Anderson Cooper, was the desire to inform the public about what they did not want to see. David Zaslav, the chairman of Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN, said that the channel was demonstrating its political impartiality in this way to attract Republican advertisers and viewers. Time has shown that this did not work, and after the election, the channel's ratings dropped by exactly half, as did those of another liberal media outlet, MSNBC. Together, they began to lose evening viewing to channels like the Food Network, whose name eloquently describes the content. Interestingly, the Republican Fox News has hardly experienced a drop in viewership compared to its main competitors. Unlike Democrats who are tired of the news (much like pro-European Ukrainians in 2010) and want to stay under the covers for the next four years, Republicans who elected Donald Trump for the second time are not tearing themselves away from the political TV channel with a continuous bright show from the White House. One of the headliners of this show, no matter what isolationist policies accompanied Trump in his first and especially in his second term, was the end of the war. More precisely (and this is a very important amendment), a peace deal. The key word in this phrase is "agreement." Because Trump's brand is about pretending to be a person who can make a deal with anyone.

During Donald Trump's first term in office, in 2018, his administration began direct negotiations with the radical Islamist Taliban movement behind the back of the official Afghan government, which the United States had been funding for years. Since after September 11, 2001, when a shocked world woke up to a new reality where planes crashed into skyscrapers - for the first time in history using Article 5 of NATO's charter - the Americans, together with their allies, overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, appointed a transitional local administration led by Hamid Karzai and... have been mired in a guerrilla war, the longest war in the history of the United States, for years. This legacy was passed from Republican George W. Bush to Democrat Barack Obama, who intended to reduce the American presence in Afghanistan, but instead increased it. "The weakness of the American strategy has always been this endless talk about how we just want to protect ourselves or have a bigger vision for Afghanistan," said Obama's special representative in Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, 9 years after the start of the operation in Afghanistan. In 2014, Hamid Karzai was replaced as president of Afghanistan by Ashraf Ghani, who had almost been elected as a UN Secretary General earlier, but not all in the country believed in a fair electoral process, so for three months the Afghan votes were counted by Americans, who honestly admitted in internal correspondence that they would never know the truth, but eventually proclaimed Ghani president. A former American citizen, Ashraf Ghani knew how to choose the right words in the right language. And his son, who was studying at the University of California, Berkeley, criticized the current Afghan mineral laws and suggested that private companies should be allowed to develop. The Americans wanted chromite, the Afghans could provide it, and a number of investigations have linked the presidential family to the development of the deposits recaptured from the Taliban. The turnout in the next presidential election was record low: Afghans no longer believed in them. American-Afghan corruption flourished, one of the peacekeepers of the NATO mission recalls: the biggest mistake was the uncontrolled involvement of the private sector in the development of Afghanistan. American military instructors, American political advisors, American diplomatic advisors, American economic advisors with sky-high fees of more than $100,000 a year - all this money came from the American budget and was supposed to ensure, for example, the reform of the Afghan army. It is not surprising that when faced with the Taliban in 2021, the army ran away, leaving American weapons without ammunition, for which there was not enough money. No, Donald Trump's administration is not the first to be interested in the mineral resources of a country whose very existence is threatened without significant American assistance. But it was Trump who, having received a complex crisis and and thoroughly corrupt region with numerous interests, on which Americans have already spent a total of $2 trillion, approached it like a child to a cake and ate the top. In 2020, he signed a peace agreement with the current Afghan government (which had no other choice), in which the Afghan government committed itself to begin diplomatic negotiations with members of the UN Security Council to remove members of the Taliban from the sanctions lists. The second peace agreement was signed with the Taliban, offering them to start peace talks with the current Afghan government. The results of the negotiations were announced: On May 1, 2021, the United States completely withdrew from Afghanistan. Nice and simple: let the Afghans negotiate among themselves, and the Americans will no longer throw a lot of money down the drain.

The Trump administration did not reconsider this decision, despite the fact that the Taliban was not going to respect the terms of the agreement , and in 2020 reduced its military presence from 13,000 troops to 2,500. All that Biden did after that was to fulfil the agreement made by his predecessor, delaying the deadline by several months... but the Taliban did not wait. The world remembers well what this led to. The end of the historic Operation Enduring Freedom, which began with the first-ever invocation of Article 5 of NATO's charter, was a crowded capital airfield where Afghans who had cooperated with Western troops and institutions were trying to escape on Western planes from Kabul, which was rapidly being captured by the Taliban. People clinging to the propellers of airplanes when they were not taken inside. Women who tried to give their children to the shocked soldiers guarding the perimeter of the airfield, just to save them. Ukrainian special forces took part in the evacuation, and both rescuers and rescued shared their impressions with me and at this time, in August 2021, American intelligence was already regularly reporting on the accumulation of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border

"The war would never have started if I had been president" - this was the first time Donald Trump said this phrase on February 26, 2022, and he has repeated it countless times since then. He couldn't help but be lucky - and now, from the Biden administration (as well as his own administration, especially the Obama administration, which allowed Putin to first invade Georgia and then annex Crimea), he inherited a new complex war. It is three times cheaper than the Afghan war, much less visible at home because the American military is not involved and does not return home in coffins. It was advertised in 2019 with a high-profile impeachment trial: long weeks of public hearings in which career diplomats and security experts from the Trump administration provided mostly circumstantial evidence of his attempts to slow down military assistance to Ukraine until the Ukrainian president found at least some dirt on Trump's election rival. During this time, both Democrats and Republicans have repeated the word "Ukraine" so much that even in the American heartland, they have learned it. I caught this process in the United States, and I, like many of my friends, was repeatedly apologized to by Americans who learned about my citizenship. Of course, American Democrats told me, your Zelenskyy could not respond differently when he confirmed at his first meeting with Trump that Trump had not put any pressure on him. After all, military aid depends on the diplomacy of his answers as long as we have this president

Since then, the Russian war has turned into a full-scale war, the pressure from Trump and his new vice president on Kyiv has increased markedly, and Zelenskyy's diplomacy has run out of steam, although Ukraine felt much more in need of American assistance during his last visit to Washington than in 2019. But even at the very beginning of Trump's second election campaign, the most odious voices in his inner circle were convincing Republicans month after month: Ukraine is corrupt, sells American weapons literally anywhere (tirelessly comparing Ukraine to Afghanistan, although there is no real basis for this), and takes advantage of Biden's weakness, who (again! like Obama, under whose administration Biden was vice president!) squanders American taxpayer dollars! At first, they looked like outsiders, but by the end of spring, 57 Republicans were voting against pro-Ukrainian bills in the U.S. House of Representatives. Their number doubled in two years, and then the House of Representatives (some of whose Republicans continued to talk about strong bilateral support when they came to Kyiv) completely blocked aid to Ukraine for four months at the end of Biden's presidency. Trump's Ukrainian fans (and there were many of them until recently) could not understand a simple thing: they seemed to be white, American-like people only to themselves, but to him they were no different from Afghans. For Trump, Russians are no different from Afghans, except for one thing. In 2019, after the only full-fledged meeting with the Russian leader during Trump's first term (the content of which remains unknown to the general public), at a joint press conference, Trump questioned his own intelligence agency's claim that Russia had interfered in the presidential election, which he won. Even his own Fox News channel did not hide its outrage at these words that day, a rare case of complete unity among American journalists. Fiona Hill, Trump's then advisor and security expert, who testified against him during his impeachment trial, is convinced: "Trump simply does not understand that Putin is laughing at him to his face, this is lost in translation, and the greatest dealmaker in modern history is not interested in further deciphering. Trump is not repeating the mistakes of his previous cadence; the impeachment has taught him a lot. There are no other people in his environment who can say that. At the talks in Paris, Steve Witkoff, who has met with Putin at least three times, began a conversation with French, British, and German security advisers by saying that the Elysee Palace reminds him of Trump's Mar-a-Lago villa. And he continued: the president is furnishing it with his own hands, he is such an architect. This once again demonstrates to European partners the boundless determination with which Trump's entourage flatters him - and Trump's expectations of the world, because he is once again the president of the most powerful country, who with one statement can bring down or raise global stock markets. Voters like it: in the first quarter of his second term, his approval rating reached 45%, which is 4 points higher than the first time. The consequences of his reckless economic policy have not yet manifested themselves (and when they do, they will be blamed on his predecessor), and his high-profile fight against migrants, transgender people, and liberal universities is admired by half the country. To this he desperately needs to add an international victory. That's why Secretary Rubio, who has grown noticeably closer to Trump since he desperately defended him during his impeachment, is putting NATO on notice: America needs a quick peace now. The first hundred days of a presidency are traditionally a symbolic date for the United States, and it falls on April 30. So next week, Trump wants to push the Europeans - and the Ukrainians - to come up with something that can be sold to the American voters as the new best possible peace deal that could never have been made without his presidential mediation.

And if it fails, you can always call Zelensky a fool.

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