Top House Democrat says Trump is 'treating our allies as if they are our adversaries'

After a contentious meeting in the Oval Office, Democrats are blaming President Trump for the fallout between his administration and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Russian officials say the U.S. now aligns with its foreign policy goals, while European leaders say they stand with Ukraine.

New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says that all hope for U.S.-Ukraine relations is not lost. But the Trump administration is not working with Ukraine the way Meeks says it should be.

“He is treating our allies as if they are our adversaries and our adversaries as if they are our allies,” Meeks says.

What has the Trump administration been doing in its negotiations to end the war?

“President Trump has been negotiating with Russia alone, without Ukraine. And you've not heard one thing that President Trump has asked Russia to give up.

“It seems to me that what President Trump is asking President Zelensky to do is to just simply surrender. And that the best way to stop the war is for him to surrender and allow Russia to continue occupying the territory that it has taken by force.

“[Trump is] not holding Russia accountable for the humanitarian disaster and the deaths of so many individuals, the violence that he has put on that country.”

Is President Zelenskyy at all responsible for his meeting with Trump turning combative? Should he have stayed quiet and given Trump what he wanted?

“I think [Zelenskyy] could not allow falsehoods to continue out of the mouth of Donald Trump. I think if you look at what took place, to me, it was somewhat of a setup in the sense that the meeting was going OK for 40 minutes until Vice President [JD] Vance then seemed to indicate to President Zelenskyy that he didn't say ‘thank you.’

“He jumped on President Zelenskyy. That's how this was initiated. I think it was President Trump who invited the cameras in and wanted to make sure that this was being recorded in that regard. So that it would appear maybe that's what he wanted: that you come and you just do whatever the king says.

“When you have two presidents talking with cameras there, each should treat each other with respect.”

With NATO seemingly divided, will European leaders be able to stick together to support Ukraine?

" I think that it's important for them to stay together, and I think that they will.

“It is clear what [President] Vladimir Putin wanted. He thought that they would win in a matter of weeks because NATO and our European allies would be divided. He thought, because of energy concerns and others, that they would not stick together.

“That proved to be absolutely incorrect. Fact of the matter is, NATO has become stronger. You had two countries who had been historically neutral, Finland and Sweden, join NATO because they are also afraid of the aggression of Russia.

“Russia is in bad shape. Their economy's in bad shape. The number of soldiers and individuals that they've lost in the war, they were barely hanging on also, that's why they needed to recruit North Korea to get weapons from them as well as to get soldiers from them. So, Russia doesn't have all the cards either.”

What does this mean for the U.S.?

“I think what's important here is members of Congress, especially many of my Republican members who believe in Ukraine, who visited and spoke to President Zelenskyy just a month ago and said, ‘We will stand by you,’ to begin to put pressure on President Trump. That would help get this back together.

" The implication is that the United States foreign policy is upside down. Again, the implication is that we want to be more aligned with Russia and North Korea than we do with our European allies and our allies in the Asia Pacific.

“It is not who we are. It is not the values that we have, and it makes that the United States may not be the indispensable nation that we've been for the last 50 years.”