FRANKLIN FOER: Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I'm Franklin Foer.

Jeffrey Goldberg is away.

This week, President Donald Trump abandoned Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an Oval Office meeting that devolved into a display of raw anger.

The fallout has been swift and intense.

Some Republicans are calling for new leadership in Ukraine while some European allies are breaking with the United States.

There's a lot to sort through, but here to help us make sense of it all are Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News, Ashley Parker is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic, and Nancy Youssef is a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Welcome back to Washington Week.

Peter, history will remember Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a great defender of democracy and today he was booted from the White House.

You wrote that today was like anything you've ever seen in all your years covering the White House.

Unpack that for us.

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, look, I mean, it's not that American presidents don't sometimes get frustrated or angry with their foreign counterparts.

They just don't usually do it on camera and at the volume and intensity that we saw today.

And it was a real -- it was practically a shouting match.

And he lashed out at Zelenskyy in a way that was personal, that was that was ferocious and that was threatening because he did say, as you point out at the beginning, that there are consequences.

If you don't accept the deal that I make with Russia, that's it.

We're out.

Big consequences for Ukraine, which has been under attack now, really for 11 years, as Zelenskyy tried to educate Trump and J.D.

Vance only to have them not listen.

FRANKLIN FOER: I want to remind our viewers of some of the strange dynamics at play.

Let's watch this clip.

DONALD TRUMP: You're not in a good position.

You don't have the cards right now.

With us, you start having cards.

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: I'm not playing cards.

DONALD TRUMP: Right now, you don't have playing cards.

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: I'm very serious, Mr. President.

I'm very serious.

DONALD TRUMP: You're gambling with the lives of millions of people.

You're gambling with World War III.

You're gambling with World War III.

And what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that's back to you far more than a lot of people said they should have.

J.D.

VANCE, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: Have you said thank you once this entire meeting?

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: A lot of times.

J.D.

VANCE: No, in this entire meeting, have you said thank you?

FRANKLIN FOER: Jon, Senator Chris Murphy and others have described this as an ambush.

Was this, in fact, a premeditated confrontation?

JONATHAN KARL, Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News: No.

I mean, look, the context here is, earlier in the week, the president met with Macron, France, he met yesterday with Starmer of the United Kingdom.

You know, and those meetings went fairly well, even though the disagreements are quite deep between the United States and our European allies right now.

This was not expected to go this way.

But I will tell you this.

I'm told that before Zelenskyy arrived at the White House, there was a pre-meeting in the Oval Office with the president, with Vice President Vance, with the treasury secretary, Bessent, who of course went to Kyiv and met with Zelenskyy, with Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, with the national security adviser, Mike Waltz.

And Trump in that meeting was quite irritated and quite angry, not interestingly so much at Zelenskyy.

He was actually upset with his own team.

He thought this minerals deal that they were supposed to sign a framework, it wasn't even a deal, it was a framework, a phase one that was supposed to be signed today, was not strong enough for the United States.

The United States was not getting a big enough share of Ukraine's natural resources.

So, he was primed to be -- FRANKLIN FOER: So, he wasn't spoiling for a fight, but he was in a grumpy mood.

JONATHAN KARL: He was in a very -- that's fair.

FRANKLIN FOER: Okay.

Ashley, just parse J.D.

Vance's role in this.

I mean, was his intervention premeditated?

ASHLEY PARKER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So, what's interesting is when you watch these clips, the real moment when it goes more off the rails than it already is what you just played, where Vance starts going after Zelenskyy and saying, you haven't said thank you once in this meeting.

And Vance is, in many ways, more strategic than President Trump, right?

With President Trump, things happen when he's in, as you put it, a grumpy mood, right?

Coming in there with a different demeanor might have led to a different outcome.

But Vance is someone who has long been skeptical, even before he was on the ticket, of Ukraine, of sending aid to Ukraine.

And it has been made clear before they even took office, that if there was something he had the ability to control, it would sort of be the end of U.S. aid to Ukraine.

So, the fact that Vance would be very sort of dismissive and sharp and challenging to the Ukrainian president is not at all surprising and is in very in line with who he is and what he actually genuinely believes.

FRANKLIN FOER: Is there any sort of internal debate about Ukraine policy when you described that meeting earlier today?

Are there factions?

Who are Rubio and Waltz would seem to be -- JONATHAN KARL: There are clear differences of opinion on Trump's own team about this.

J.D.

Vance represents what you might call the Tucker Carlson wing of the party, very anti-Ukraine.

Not just anti-U.S. support for Ukraine, but suggesting that Ukraine is the bad party in that fight.

Look, when J. D. Vance went to Munich and gave that speech, and he said that Europe's own policies, the European countries and their own -- how they treat their own people is more of a threat to security in Europe than Russia or China.

That is not something you would have seen Marco Rubio say, that's not something you've seen Mike Waltz say.

Both of them have been on record for a long time supporting a Ukraine funding, but the question is, is any of that expressed in the meetings?

Are they actually challenging Trump on this point?

And I don't get a sense, after this meeting, Marco Rubio put out a statement on X, a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, and said that he couldn't be more proud of the way Donald Trump stood up for his country.

ASHLEY PARKER: It feels like if you looked at Secretary Rubio's body language, that might be the closest you could get to an expression of his true feelings.

FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.

But, Nancy, I'm relying on your telepathic skill, which I have faith in.

What do you think Zelenskyy was thinking as he entered this meeting?

What was his expectation as he walked in?

NANCY YOUSSEF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: Well, I think at the minimum is that the war and the U.S. support is at jeopardy and how you can then end this war, because the pathway that was supposed to happen today, believe it or not, this was supposed to be a positive meeting.

It was supposed to end with some sort of framework for a minerals deal.

And now he's finding this confrontation with what was the biggest backer of Ukraine military, $119 billion dollars from one country alone.

And so I think there was some -- what we heard from him was agitation that he was being attacked by an ally that we've -- when is the last time you saw a wartime president, an ally being attacked by the United States?

I think, in some ways, he was expressing frustration that a lot of Ukrainians feel because they have felt under attack by the president in this first month in office.

And I think you started to see him, particularly in that Fox News interview, afterwards, start to lay out a framework for what do you do if the U.S. is not going to be the kind of allied partner that they were just a month ago, that, going forward, they're going to have to depend more on Europe for weapons and support, and potentially have to conduct the war differently if they can't get the kind of weapons support that they've gotten throughout this war.

FRANKLIN FOER: Before we leave the meeting itself, just watching the Fox News interview in the aftermath, there were a lot of people on Fox News saying Zelenskyy should have handled this differently.

It just is a matter of, of course, if he had reacted differently, would there have been a different outcome?

PETER BAKER: It's possible.

If you watch the entire thing, the first 40 minutes, there's some friction there, right?

They obviously are stating different positions.

And Zelenskyy is very intent on saying, I don't want a simple ceasefire because that simply empowers the Russians.

It has to be a bigger deal and you shouldn't trust Putin.

He is not, you know, a good faith actor.

And he's making these points to Trump.

But he's really trying to convince Trump.

He brings these pictures of Ukrainians who've been held prisoner, right, and showing Trump how badly they've been treated by the Russians.

He's trying to get through to Trump that Putin is not a good guy.

But he doesn't have the defer and flatter gene that Starmer and Macron have, right?

He doesn't play to Trump's ego the way these other foreign leaders have -- FRANKLIN FOER: But it's not like that actually broke through, their strategy actually broke through with Trump.

PETER BAKER: You could argue it doesn't make a difference, but they don't get yelled at, right.

And their goal in these meetings seems to be not to get yelled at.

Zelenskyy has a lot bigger problems than being yelled at.

His problem is if the biggest ally he has withdraws his support.

JONATHAN KARL: I mean, it may prove to have been a miscalculation on Zelenskyy, not that he was the one that provoked this, not that this is his fault, how this played out, but, look, play if he had played the Trump's ego, if he hadn't, you know, gotten the kind of indignant response that he had to J.D.

Vance, I mean, for good reason, but if he hadn't done that, the cameras could have gone back, they could have had their lunch, they could have signed their preliminary agreement, there still would have been a lot more to go.

But he's now in a very, very bad situation.