OPINION: Ukraine Can Beat Trump’s Game – Here’s How

Every time the pressure spikes, President Donald Trump reaches for the same lever. He does not dilute the story. He overwhelms it.

Despite years of driving America’s news cycles, perhaps we should consider that Trump’s theatrics are not a personality quirk. Rather, they are a demonstrably repeatable political tactic: When a headline threatens Trump’s interests, he throws a new headline into the center of the arena, one that is louder, stranger, and easier to broadcast than whatever hard-to-make-viral news is breaking from the latest courtroom or document dump saga.

Unfortunately, Ukraine has often been used as one of these attention-grabbing spectacles. One day Trump says he had a “great meeting” with the Ukrainian delegation, but within hours retorts that it is, again, the Ukrainians who do not want peace. However, if we want to understand why this is happening, we need to zoom out to see the bigger picture, as we recently did in Davos.

Greenland has been a go-to Trump card for over a year. Before even re-taking office, on Jan. 6, 2025, a New York judge rejected Trump’s bid to delay sentencing in the hush money case. Within 24 hours, Trump staged a bombastic, marathon Mar-a-Lago press conference that yanked attention towards America’s suddenly urgent need to control Greenland and the Panama Canal. The hush money legal problem remained a threat, but it stopped being frontpage news.

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Satellite Imagery Confirms Ukrainian Drones Did Big Damage During Putin Conference

Ukrainian drones struck St. Petersburg’s oil terminal – causing large fires and multiple tanks hit – and set the corvette Boykiy ablaze in Kronstadt drydock on June 3 – the opening day of a Kremlin-promoted blue-ribbon conference called SPIEF. Satellite imagery confirmed the damage and smoke was visible to delegates. Russian state media ignored the strike and instead highlighted Russia’s importance and the conference’s “multipolar success” with 20,000 attendees from 130+ countries.

Routinely we have seen how well this mechanism works: Legal developments are procedural and slow, but spectacle is instant, visual, and endlessly clip-ready. Once Trump launches into his performance, he knows that everyone in his midst will be forced into a predictable loop. Allies defend it. Critics attack it. Journalists cover the clash. The public watches the entertaining fireworks and no one remembers to ask what is Trump’s real motive for this latest episode of the absurd.

So, consider, why would Trump send Norway’s Prime Minister a message implying that losing the Nobel Peace Prize drove his Greenland push, and that he no longer felt bound to pursue it “purely by peaceful means”? Was it really to persuade Oslo, and Trump really had no idea it would become a top news story?

Considering his track record, it would be reasonable to posit that Trump sent the note because he understands how America’s media works. A bizarre provocation pulls cameras like gravity. While the press argues about the letter, Trump controls the narrative, sets the frame, and forces every institution in the room to react on his timetable.

All of this gives Trump control. The long-time owner of country clubs, we see how this work experience rubs off on his recent “Board of Peace” proposal that reads like a club’s governance but scaled to the global level. According to publicly available information, potential future members are chosen by the Chairman. Whether they can become permanent members, after a massive contribution, is the decision of the Chairman. What tier status someone will have, is the decision of the Chairman.

So, dues, invites, and permanent tables... is it surprising that Trump himself is the Chairman of the Board who gets to decide who makes the cut and who does not? If you wish to have control over what happens, and what is in the news, being the self-nominated Chairman of the Board is the best seat in town.

Combining both the media tactics and the institutional frameworks, digesting the Trump years’ logic becomes easier: When threatened, Trump floods the airwaves with outlandish comments that he knows will anger people, but that will not damage support within his base. As we have seen, this strategy for control keeps repeating for one reason: It works.

Trump’s advantage is not persuasion. It is tempo: He decides what everyone has to talk about, even when the thing they should be talking about is the threat in front of him.

For Ukraine, the lesson is simple: do not let Ukraine’s war become the instrument Trump uses to launder his domestic problems into an international crisis. Ukraine is uniquely useful as a distraction lever because it guarantees instant coverage, moral urgency, and heated argument. If Trump can trigger a Ukraine flare-up, announce a sudden “peace” plan, or provoke a public clash with allies, the cameras follow the conflict and the scrutiny he is facing at home loses oxygen.

The response is not outrage, it is control. Refuse to argue inside his framing on his timetable. Drag every discussion back to specifics: written commitments, verifiable actions, enforceable timelines, and clear costs for violations. Do not negotiate under spectacle conditions, and do not make concessions while the story is being used as a diversion. Do not engage with Trump’s baseless statements as it only fuels the distraction that he is seeking.

The only way to beat the sideshow is to take center stage: Ukraine and its partners win by denying the tactic its payoff: keep the agenda anchored to facts and outcomes, hold the line when the noise spikes, and force any Ukraine-related move to be concrete enough that it survives the next manufactured uproar.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.