ESSAY: The weekend the "Free World" died

In the Oval Office fiasco, a country revealed

Early in the afternoon on Friday, the president and the vice president of the United States delivered a contemptuous scolding to the wartime leader of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. The country of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” and “We choose to go to the moon” and “rendezvous with destiny” had become the country of “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.” It was a shocking, abusive scene, unlike any foreign policy chroniclers could recall. By Sunday, the British prime minister had declared that “we are at a crossroads in history,” and European countries were talking about a coalition of the willing to defend Ukraine. It was the weekend the notion of the “free world” died.

The American spirit is not a fixed quantity but rather a contest between competing spirits. There is a generous spirit and a cruel one, a big heart and a small one, an earnestness and a cynicism, a forward-looking spirit and a spirit consumed with nostalgia and stewing in resentment. There is the America of abolition and the America of slavery, the America of Reconstruction and the America of Redemption, the America of civil rights and the America of the Klan, the America built of immigrants and the America of family separation, the America that endlessly renews itself and the America that clings, the America of inconvenient ideals and the America of mercenary calculation, the America of principles worth sacrificing for and the America that only knows and pursues raw power and domination.

What made the spectacle in the Oval Office on Friday so haunting is that it seemed to confirm, dramatically and before all the world, the triumph of that darker, lower American spirit over its opposite at this juncture of history. And not only because of one man, if we are honest. It is a triumph that feels weighty, that feels earned.

President Trump has always been a mix of alien invader and emanation of the collective American being, and here, again, the “This is not who we are” fantasy continues to ring more and more hollow. This is very, very much who we are, now.

On display in that meeting was Trump’s, and Vance’s, instinctual siding with whoever has power in a situation. Some people see a fight and rush to the side of the weak; others — and this goes very deep — reflexively rush to the side of the strong. In the meeting, the American tendency to side with the underdog was all but absent. But of course it is absent from much of American life generally now, with our winners-take-all economy and our tech broligarchy that dominates more and more of everything. Is it an accident that a country that has grown more hospitable to conglomerates than startups, to incumbent committee chairs than political insurgents, to streaming executives than auteurs, has now sided with Vladimir Putin over Zelensky?

The American spirit on display in the meeting was the calculating one, the one that asks “What’s in this for me? What’s my angle?” at every turn. And it is ugly to watch, but here, too, Trump is more a mirror of the culture than some deviant. All of American life feels driven by this same calculating spirit now. The drugstores where you cannot find an actual wage-earning human being to help you unlock the shampoo from behind the plexiglass. The restaurants where you are told you must return your table in 90 minutes. The landlords who will kick you out for $100 more. The health insurance companies whose main specialty is the writing of claim denial letters.

Toward the end of the meeting, Trump commented that the awful scene he had participated in would make great television. Here was the triumph of the spirit of attention-seeking at any cost, the spirit in which there are no values worth defending if they do not carry the possibility of making people watch you. Everyone is an influencer now; everyone covets followers more than friends. Trump trash-talked an erstwhile American ally because he knew it would do numbers with his followers.

In recent weeks, I have wondered why the leaders of other countries have not been brave in calling out the situation in the United States, in naming this fascist threat from within. The obvious answer is American power and leverage. It can be expensive to speak truth to superpower, as Zelensky will surely be learning in coming days.

But after the meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday, I began to wonder if another reason is involved. Maybe those leaders, like much of the world, do not look at America right now and see a country being hijacked by this dangerous leader. Maybe much of the world looks at a country that, in its bones, has fundamentally changed. Has lost that other spirit. Lost the sunniness, the hopefulness, the decency, the will to sacrifice, the idealism, the confidence, the hope.

What will stop Trump? everyone is asking all day long. Maybe an actual and effective form of resistance will involve more than the thwarting of a leader. It will be a cultural project up and down American life. To resist the meanness and smallness and cruelty and cynicism and solipsism. To insist, by showing, that what he is is not who we are.

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A very special thank you to my son, Orion, for the piano accompaniment on the voiceover.

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Photo: Saul Loeb/Getty