Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice suggested during an interview with MSNBC that the Donald Trump-Volodymyr Zelenskyy meeting was a “setup.” She also told host Nicolle Wallace that she was "embarrassed" by Trump’s clash with the Ukrainian President.
“It's a very sad day and an embarrassment for the United States on the world stage. But let's step back and analyze what's happened here. I think there's no question that this was a setup,” Rice said.
Rice also claimed that the “setup” was done to appease Russian President Valdimir Putin.
“You heard Donald Trump say at the end of that clip you played, this is great television. This was a setup. Volodymyr, I mean, excuse me, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was compelled to agree to a horrible deal that would have sent Ukraine's minerals to the United States without any concrete security guarantees,” Rice said.
{{/usCountry}}“You heard Donald Trump say at the end of that clip you played, this is great television. This was a setup. Volodymyr, I mean, excuse me, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was compelled to agree to a horrible deal that would have sent Ukraine's minerals to the United States without any concrete security guarantees,” Rice said.
{{/usCountry}}She continued, “And yet, because he was trying to improve a relationship with Donald Trump, he came to Washington, he came to the Oval Office and sat down for a meeting, hat in hand. And soon after he got there, the vice president of the United States lit into him and started a confrontation. Now, I've been in countless Oval Office meetings with heads of state, presidents and vice presidents, as national security advisor, as U.N. ambassador, and in other roles. I can tell you that the vice president or the secretary of state or anybody else, they don't jump in, hijack a conversation without the express blessing of the president of the United States. So J.D. Vance did that deliberately. Donald Trump knew what he was going to do.”
“And I think, as he said at the end, because he can't help himself, this was a setup for the cameras. It was a play to his base. But above all, it was a play to Vladimir Putin, to show fealty to Vladimir Putin and to try to humiliate Zelenskyy,” Rice added.
Susan Rice praises Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s ‘dignity and guts’
Rice praised Zelenskyy for his “dignity and guts” as he refused to play along with the “script.” “And Zelenskyy has people that he democratically represents. And as a result, he couldn't sit there in silence as lies were being told about how the war was started, whose responsibility it was, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And he tried to explain what is, in fact, the case. To suggest that he was not thankful, I can't count the number of times that Zelenskyy has thanked the American people, the American government, the president of the United States for the critical support that we've provided. It's not about gratitude,” she said.
Rice said the “setup” was an attempt to “humiliate” Zelenskyy and to “scuttle the U.S.-Ukraine relationship so that Trump no longer feels any obligation to provide support and to hand U.S. interests and Ukraine and potentially Europe to Putin on a silver platter.”