Donald Trump Jr, the eldest son of the US president, has suggested that Washington may walk away from the war in Ukraine. Speaking at a Middle East conference, he launched a lengthy tirade against the continuation of the conflict and the Ukrainian leadership, saying that the US should no longer act as “the idiot with the chequebook”.
Although Mr Trump Jr holds no formal role in the administration, he is a prominent figure in the Make America Great Again movement. His comments reflect deep antipathy towards the Ukrainian government within some circles of the Trump team, which is currently pressing Kyiv to make territorial concessions.
In his remarks, Mr Trump Jr accused President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of prolonging the war because he feared losing an election if it ended. He claimed that Ukraine was “far more corrupt than Russia” and that its wealthy elite had fled the country, leaving “what they believed to be the peasant class” to do the fighting. He offered no evidence for these assertions.
He also criticised the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, arguing that sanctions against Russia had failed because they merely pushed up oil prices, allowing Moscow to fund its war effort. He dismissed the European strategy of waiting for Russia to go bankrupt as “not a plan”.
Mr Trump Jr said that during his canvassing in the 2022 election campaign, only three people had ranked Ukraine among their top ten concerns. He argued that the threat of fentanyl arriving on boats from Venezuela was “far more a clear and present danger” than the situation in Ukraine or Russia. He also recounted an unverified observation of Monaco, claiming that half of the supercars there bore Ukrainian number plates.
Asked whether his father, who campaigned on a promise to bring peace to Ukraine, might simply walk away from the conflict, Mr Trump Jr said “maybe”, describing the president as one of the most unpredictable figures in politics. He vowed that the US would no longer underwrite the war effort indefinitely.
