The hastily arranged Trump-Zelensky meeting at Trump Tower last Friday will be unlikely to erase five years of bad blood between the two leaders. Indeed, one day after the tense smiles faded, the Trump team was back at it, trash talking Ukraine’s president. 

On Saturday, the vice presidential candidate, Senator Vance, started a speech near Philadelphia by criticizing Mr. Zelensky for touring an ammunition factory at Scranton with the state’s governor, Joshua Shapiro, a Democrat once on the short list to be Kamala Harris’s running mate.

“He came to campaign with the Democratic leadership of this country,” Mr. Vance said in Newtown. “We spent $200 billion on Ukraine. You know what I wish Zelensky would do when he comes to the United States of America? Say thank you to the people of Pennsylvania and everybody else.”

Mr. Zelensky, of course, had thanked the 400 workers at the plant for churning out 155 mm howitzer shells and saving “millions of Ukrainians.” Yet, in the Trump camp, skepticism of the Ukrainian cause is not expected to dissipate. “Trump is serious when he says he is going to cut a deal between Zelensky and Putin,” a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump, John Bolton, told CNN after the Trump Tower meeting. “In terms of American support for Ukraine, if Trump wins, that is toast.”

Unlike the chumminess displayed by Ms. Harris on Thursday when she met Mr. Zelensky in Washington, Trump reminded reporters on Friday of his friendship with Mr. Putin. “We have a very good relationship (with Zelensky). And I also have a very good relationship, as you know, with President Putin.”

In last month’s debate, Trump pointedly declined to pick sides when asked which country he would like to see win the Russia-Ukraine war. Putting on a brave face, Mr. Zelensky told Fox after his meeting with the presidential candidate: “I got from Donald Trump very direct information that he will be on our side, that he will support Ukraine.” 

Mr. Zelensky’s nearly weeklong visit to America was timed to address the General Assembly, to unveil his “Victory Plan,” and to shore up bipartisan support for more military aid to Ukraine this fall. Coming barely six weeks before the American election, it clearly a risk that he would get trapped in presidential politics.

Outraged that no Republicans were invited on the ammo plant tour, conservative commentators cried Democratic foul play. “The Harris campaign is using its own leverage over Zelensky to make him a campaign surrogate, hoping to complete its pitch to Nikki Haley-style Republican voters who overwhelmingly support Ukraine,” Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in a National Review essay titled: “Zelensky’s Inexplicable and Inexcusable Partisanship.”

When the Trump-Zelensky meeting did take place, hours before the Ukrainian leader flew out of New York, analysts saw political calculation, in addition to Trump’s love of appearing statesmanlike and of dominating the daily news cycle. Last month, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 64 percent of registered voters say they support Ukraine’s use of American-supplied missiles to strike inside Russia.

This included 78 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans.

Mr. Bolton, the former Trump aide and envoy to the United Nations, speculated that Friday’s meeting was “designed to calm the nerves of some of the Republicans.”

The Trump-Zelensky minuet goes way back, to the fall of 2019. At that time, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for allegedly pressuring the Ukrainian president to open an investigation of the former vice president, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.

At that time, the elder Mr. Biden was the front runner for the Democratic nomination. The younger Mr. Biden had just completed what was essentially a highly lucrative no-show job — five years on the board of a Ukrainian gas producer. According to a whistleblower, Trump was pinching the garden hose on $400 million worth of congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine. In the end, the Senate voted to acquit.

Much of the case boiled down to a telephone call between Mr. Zelensky and Trump. Given the fast pace of news, many Americans — and many reporters — probably have forgotten the five-year-old call. Trump has not. On Friday, out of the blue, he volunteered that Mr. Zelensky “could have grandstanded and played cute,” Trump said of public furor over the call. “He was like a piece of steel. He said President Trump did nothing wrong.”

During his five years in office, Mr. Zelensky, an actor by profession, has carefully maintained a public persona of neutrality in American politics. He has cultivated relationships on both sides of the aisle, recognizing that he needs support in Congress to win annual approvals of military aid. Although 57 nations give aid to Ukraine, America is the largest single donor.

Last week, possibly due to fatigue after two and a half years as a wartime commander, Mr. Zelensky let his impartiality slip. In an interview with the New Yorker, he dismissed as “too radical” Mr. Vance’s proposal for how Ukraine could live alongside Russia: land for peace, no NATO membership, and neutrality. Mr. Zelensky commented: “Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war, even if he might think he knows how.”

Then, his Ambassador to America, Oksana Markarova, apparently failed to check bipartisan balance on the United States Air Force plane to Scranton, location of the ammunition plant. Not only is Scranton Mr. Biden’s hometown, but it is a key city in a key swing state.

In today’s electrically charged, pre-election climate, Republicans give the Ukrainian trip poor marks. Speaker Johnson called on Ukraine’s president to fire his ambassador in Washington. He blasted the trip as “designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference.” On Thursday, he boycotted congressional meetings with Mr. Zelensky in Washington. Senator Cruz called Ukraine’s president “an absolute moron.” 

Ms. Harris shot back that the Trump team formula for peace is “proposals for surrender.” Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania said of Mr. Vance, his Senate colleague across the aisle: “No one’s really listening to him anymore.”
At the end of the week, Mr. Zelensky’s fifth visit to Washington since the Russian invasion of February 2022, the weary Ukrainian leader told Fox: “I don’t want to be involved in the election period … I don’t want to lose one or another part of Americans.”