Donald Trump said his meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were positive. The talks took place in Washington, D.C., while both leaders were in town for a memorial service for Senator Lindsey Graham, a man described as an influential advocate for Israel and Ukraine. The whole scene was pure hierarchy on display: heads of state, a former president, and a memorial for a senator who spent his career pushing the interests of two governments already drenched in power.
Who Has the Power
Trump’s account is the only detail given about the meetings themselves. He said they were positive. That’s the language of the ruling class when it wants the public to accept backroom coordination as normal. No one in the article says what ordinary people in Ukraine, Israel, or the United States get out of these encounters. The people who live with the consequences are absent. The people who make the decisions are all there.
The meetings happened in Washington, D.C., the capital of the U.S. state apparatus, where political theater and real power often wear the same suit. Zelenskiy and Netanyahu were attending a memorial service for Senator Lindsey Graham, who died earlier in July. Graham was described as an influential advocate for Israel and Ukraine, which tells you exactly whose interests he spent his career serving. Not workers. Not the poor. Not anyone trying to build something outside the machinery of state power.
What the Memorial Really Marks
A memorial service can be a solemn thing. It can also be a gathering point for the people who already hold the levers. Here, the article places Trump, Zelenskiy, and Netanyahu in the same orbit around Graham’s death, with the memorial serving as the setting for political meetings. The dead senator becomes the occasion, and the living power brokers do the work.
Graham died earlier in July, and the article says he was an influential advocate for Israel and Ukraine. That’s the whole frame. Influence, advocacy, access. The language is clean and polite, but the structure is blunt: a senator used his position to back allied states, and those states’ leaders showed up in Washington to pay respects and talk shop. The public gets the ceremony. The insiders get the meeting.
The People Left Out
The article gives no sign of any grassroots response, mutual aid, or direct action. There’s no mention of communities organizing for themselves, no horizontal power, no self-defense from below. Just the familiar vertical arrangement: presidents, prime ministers, senators, and a memorial service that doubles as a diplomatic corridor.
That absence matters. When the only voices in the room belong to officeholders, the rest of society becomes scenery. The decisions made in these spaces land somewhere else, on people who didn’t get a seat, a microphone, or even a say. The article doesn’t spell out those costs, but it does show the architecture that produces them.
Trump’s description of the meetings as positive is the final note, and it lands like a press release from the palace. Positive for whom? The article doesn’t say. It doesn’t need to. The names tell the story. Washington. Zelenskiy. Netanyahu. Graham. Trump. The machinery hums along, and the public is expected to call it diplomacy.