House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the relationship between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must be salvaged for the “good of the free world” in light of a tense back-and-forth between the two sides at the White House on Friday.
“It has to be salvaged for the good of the free world if America is going to continue to play that role,” Jeffries said during a Friday appearance on CNN.
The House minority leader said Washington’s “leadership of the free world in the aftermath of World War Two — to create a rules based society all across the globe is in America’s national security interest — is designed to keep our people safe and secure and free of the type of global conflict that cost so many lives, including American lives during World War One and World War Two.”
“And so it certainly is the case that we’ll need to see some mature leadership from the Trump administration,” he told CNN host Wolf Blitzer.
The relationship between Trump and Zelensky strained after Friday’s heated spat, which did not result in signing the rare minerals deal or bringing the Eastern European neighbors closer to a permanent ceasefire.
The meeting went sideways when Vance told Zelensky that Trump was brokering peace through diplomacy, an assertion Zelensky questioned, pointing to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s previous backtracks on ceasefire agreements.
The vice president said the Ukraine president was “disrespectful” for hashing it out in front of the media and said Zelensky “should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to his conflict.”
Zelensky said America has not directly experienced the consequences of the devastating three-year conflict, with it being far removed geographically from Eastern Europe, a comment that set off an intense response from Trump.
“You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards,” Trump said during the Friday meeting, adding that Zelensky is “gambling with the lives of millions of people, you’re gambling with World War III … and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”
After the meeting, Trump said that Zelensky is not prepared to make a peace agreement that would put an end to the Eastern European war and that he can come back to Washington once he is ready to broker it.
Zelensky said on Fox News, hours after the meeting, that he will not apologize for Friday’s argument and that neither side benefited from it.
Trump told reporters that Zelensky can restart the talks by expressing a desire for a peace agreement and tamping down his criticism of Putin.
“He’s got to say, ‘I want to make peace,’” Trump said on Friday. “He doesn’t have to stand there and say about ‘Putin this, Putin that.’ All negative things. He’s got to say ‘I want to make peace. I don’t want to fight a war any longer.’”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was sitting next to Vance during the meeting, said Zelensky should apologize to Trump and questioned if the Ukrainian president wanted to reach a ceasefire agreement.
The country’s top diplomat said Zelensky should “apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became. There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic.”
“And so you start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t, and that active, open undermining of efforts to bring about peace is deeply frustrating for everyone who’s been involved in communications with them leading up to today,” Rubio said Friday night on CNN.
