The Media Research Center is not aggressively pro-Russia on its war in Ukraine like, say, WorldNetDaily, but it is aggressively pro-Trump (and it did get mad that people said nice things about President Biden’s surprise trip to Ukraine in 2023). So it looked askance at anyone who doubted Trump’s promise to quickly end (and possibly profit off) the war. Mark Finkelstein grumbled in a Feb. 28 post:
If President Trump manages to pull off an arrangement that ends the war in Ukraine while reimbursing the United States for some of the tens of billions it has sent to that country, most would see that as a huge win for the world as well as for our country.
“Most”–but not all. The liberal media will do its best to naysay and second-guess any such deal.
Take Friday’s Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough dug deep in his history books to analogize the prospective US-Ukraine deal to the Treaty of Versailles, which was a key to the ending of WWI. Scarborough didn’t explain his analogy, but presumably was alluding to the heavy reparation obligations that the Treaty imposed on Germany for having instigated the war.
And then there was historian and former occasional Biden speechwriter Jon Meacham, who called the deal, and by extension Trump, “imperialist.”
Like Scarborough, Meacham didn’t explain himself, but might have been referring to the imperialist practice of exploiting the natural resources of its colonies. The huge difference here is that the US would be seeking reimbursement for having come to the aid of Ukraine, to the tune of over $100 billion, in defending itself against Russia.
[…]But more than half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals are reportedly located in the four regions annexed by Russia in 2022. If Americans were sent into those regions to extract the minerals, surely Putin would understand that any action that could potentially harm them would have to be met with a forceful American response.
The MRC also made sure to take Trump’s side in a snippy, combative meeting he conducted with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Finkelstein groused in a March 2 post:
Talk about catastrophizing! On Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend, MSNBC contributor and Never Trumper Charlie Sykes said that calling Friday’s Oval Office meeting among Zelensky, Trump, and Vance a “fiasco and disaster” wasn’t negative enough!
No, in the world according to Sykes, the meeting marked nothing less than “a breaking point in world history.” Not only, per Sykes, is the United States under Trump “no longer the leader of the free world,” but “in many cases” is actually its “adversary!”
[…]Cheer up, Charlie. The world is not about to end. Consider that after the meeting, far from declaring that Zelensky had permanently become persona non grata, Trump said that “He can come back when he is ready for peace.”
And within 24 hours, Zelensky responded “we are ready to sign the minerals agreement.” And in an important change to his position at the meeting, Zelensky did not demand that security guarantees be part of the minerals deal, but only that it would be a “first step” toward those guarantees.
So you might be able to describe what happened in the Oval Office as . . . the art of the deal.
Finkelstein didn’t explain why Ukraine must pay the U.S. a ransom for its help against Russia.
Bill D’Agostino groused that the non-right-wing media saw the meeting for what it was in a March 3 post:
The corporate media were predictably horrified by the explosive Oval Office meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But notably, the language journalists have been using to describe the meeting is virtually identical to that of Democratic politicians: namely, that the whole thing was a “premeditated,” “deliberate ambush,” meant to provide justification for the USA’s total diplomatic and financial abandonment of Ukraine.
[…]It’s easy to see all of this and suspect that perhaps the media are taking marching orders from the Democrats. And thanks to the events of the 2024 election cycle, now we’ve got evidence to prove that that kind of thing actually happens.
And D’Agostino is not taking marching orders from the Republicans in his desperateness to put a pro-Trump spin on the meeting?
The same day, P.J. Gladnick complained that Ukrainians expressed their support of Zelensky following the meeting:
The Associated Press is currently suing the Trump White House and claiming they’re a “global, independent, non-partisan news organization.”
Their latest attempt to prove support among the Ukrainian people for President Vladimir Zelenskyy over President Donald Trump was so laughably lame as to induce widespread mockery. In the wake of the contentious White House meeting between Zelensky and Trump, AP put together a video that was intended to show general support among Ukrainians for the stances taken by their president.
The problem for AP in making their case for Zelensky was that they used only two, count ’em, TWO Ukrainian interviewees. They were also two of the sources offering glowing praise for the Ukrainian leader in a story by AP’s Justin Spike headlined “Ukrainians rally around Zelenskyy as defender of national interest after Oval Office blowout.”
A “nonpartisan” news agency wouldn’t line up a parade of Ukrainians to praise Zelenskyy and rail against Trump.
Gladnick sneered that this was a “very lazy attempt by AP to create the idea of animosity in Ukraine towards Trump” and concluded: “It looks like AP needs to brush up on the devious art of creating effective fake news propaganda. Perhaps its time for them to conduct a refresher course on this topic. A good locale for AP students of such lessons can be found down by the Gulf Of America.” Looks like Gladnick is annoyed that the AP has chosen to stick with the birth name of the Gulf of Mexico instead of Trump’s arbitrarily designated moniker.
Finkelstein returned in a March 12 post to gloat that the meeting was a success because Ukraine eventually agreed to a planned cease-fire — which was meaningless because Russia refused to fully sign onto it.