Yale historian Timothy Snyder writing on Substack:

The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic.

Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, the Ukrainian president, is of Jewish origin. Members of his family fought in the Red Army against the Germans. Others were murdered in the Holocaust. Although his Jewishness is not very relevant in Ukrainian politics, it is highly salient to Russian (and other) antisemites.

Last Friday I happened to start watching the discussion at the White House between Zelens’kyi, Donald Trump, JD Vance and Brian Glenn towards the end, when Vance was already yelling at the Ukrainian president: “you’re wrong!” I took in the tone and the body language, and my first, reflexive reactions was: these are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew. Three against one. A roomful against one. An antisemitic scene.

The man who asked him about his clothes, Brian Glenn, is a conspiracy-theorizing far-right journalist. It is not clear why he was in the Oval Office; but he does seem to know Marjorie Taylor-Greene, she of the Jewish space lasers and the determined defense of Russian propaganda. The man who demanded deference and spoke of “propaganda tours,” JD Vance, had just returned from Germany, where he made a point of publicly supporting the German far right. Vance presents Zelens’kyi as a corrupt liar, with no evidence beyond what was brought to him by an internet which has, apparently, found his vulnerabilities. The man who insisted that the Americans (and indeed he himself personally) were the real heroes, Donald Trump, told Jews last fall they would be held responsible if he lost the election – among many other things. And the man behind them all, Elon Musk, supports the extreme right in several countries, adapts his social media platform to support fascists, and is notorious around the world for his Hitlergrüß. Musk’s idea that Zelens’kyi is a grifter could hardly be more antisemitic.