Disrespecting the Bing

A joint Zelenskyy/Trump news conference was cancelled today, after an Oval Office dust-up where Trump and JD Toady Vance both went at Zelenskyy about his ingratitude to the US. Then the group of state media that Trump assembles in the Oval Office asked piercing questions like why Zelenskyy isn’t wearing a suit. The Guardian live blog has the details. 

Adam Silverman at Balloon-Juice will almost certainly have better analysis of the geopolitics of the meeting. But I want to focus on the circus aspects, because that’s what’s being pushed through what we used to call the puke funnel. This is a clear case of Trump and JD setting up a “disrespecting the Bing” situation, which is a reference to the a Sopranos episode where the gangsters wanted to off someone, but they couldn’t come up with a good reason, so they made it appear that the victim disrespected the club where they all met (the Bing). The irony that drives the humor here is that the Bing was a strip club / house of prostitution.

One of the differences between the way that Trumpists are reacting to this, and sane people are reacting, is that sane people think the optics and substance of this are terrible. On Bluesky, there was a ton of outrage about what happened, and they’re not wrong. A Politico foreign affairs correspondent posted the exchange between JD and Zelenskyy and said it was “jaw dropping” that the White House posted it to their rapid response account. The clear implication from the reporter was that the exchange was terrible and it was incredible that the White House bragged about it.

My jaw is not dropped. They know what they’re doing. They want to leverage their base’s inherent distrust and dislike of foreign aid by making Zelenskyy look like an ungrateful ass who couldn’t even bother to dress for a meeting and won’t say thank you. And it will work. They have the machinery to make it work. We don’t have machinery to get out the other side of the story.

(Update: Here’s an unedited feed of the whole thing from the Fox affiliate in DFW.)