Sept. 23, 2025
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times
Sometimes you have to get outside America, and go to a place like Ukraine, to see the full impact of Donald Trump’s policies on both our country and the world. What I saw so clearly from Kyiv several days ago was a stark contrast: How Trump is loving Israel’s democracy to death, while shunning Ukrainian democracy to life, to coin a phrase.
Over the past few years, Ukrainians have developed their own drone industry, with a system for adapting to new battlefield conditions that is now so fast that Ukrainian Army engineers are recoding their drones from one attack to the next to respond to Russian countermeasures. At the Yalta European Strategy conference that I attended, the hosts showcased a typical drone assembly line: one person was building the frames, one adding propellers and a third the control boards. Over the two days of the conference, I’d guess they built around 100 of them right there in the lobby.
Ukrainians aren’t waiting for Trump to save their democracy. In recent months, the U.S. president has been all over the place and then some on the Ukraine-Russia war: one day blaming Ukraine for starting it, one day vowing to sanction Vladimir Putin’s oil exports, one day posting on Truth Social “This is not TRUMP’S WAR. It is Biden’s and Zelensky’s war,” without even mentioning Putin, and then declaring Tuesday — after meeting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at the U.N. General Assembly — that Ukraine “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” without offering any new U.S. help.
But can we rely on our democratic institutions to save us? When you look at today’s America from Kyiv or Jerusalem, you notice the degree to which democracy-loving Ukrainians and Israelis have been willing to take to the streets — in the middle of hot wars — to push back on their would-be autocrats trying to gut their democratic institutions.
Meanwhile, in the face of declarations like Trump’s that it should be “illegal” to criticize him, the most cowardly Americans — particularly the tech titans of Silicon Valley and virtually the whole Republican Party — go along for the ride, while those who are the most activist boast that they tweeted against it or pressed the like button on a post from their favorite liberal influencer. That is the protest equivalent of firing a mortar into the Milky Way and believing that you’ve had an impact. Thank God social media was not around for the women’s rights or civil rights movements.
For a contrast, consider one of the first things I learned in meeting with democracy activists in Kyiv — something that I had missed while worrying about my own democracy. Earlier in the summer, Zelensky’s ruling party in Ukraine, Servant of the People, had pushed through a law
stripping the authority of two independent anticorruption bodies (the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office) to decide who could be prosecuted in high-level corruption cases. The new law transferred their prosecutorial authority to the general prosecutor, a presidential appointee. This would have allowed the presidency to unilaterally close or reassign corruption investigations involving top officials.
The troubling bad news is that Zelensky — and the powerful head of his office, Andriy Yermak — pushed this law. The amazingly good news is that average Ukrainians, led mostly by young people, pushed against it. And they didn’t just post emojis against it on their Facebook pages. Instead, they defied the almost daily and deadly drone attacks by Putin and took to the streets in mass protests to demand that Zelensky and Yermak take their hands off these vital anticorruption institutions. They forced Zelensky to call a new vote and overturn the law a few days after he signed it.
As the BBC reported on July 31: “It was only 10 days earlier that MPs had backed Zelensky’s controversial law, and yet they voted on Thursday by 331 to 0 to overturn it. On both occasions they appeared to be following Zelensky’s direction.” Zelensky posted on social media, “Ukraine is a democracy — there are definitely no doubts.”
Those young Ukrainians who made that happen knew they would never get into the European Union — the giant center of free markets, rule of law and democratic freedoms that they desperately want to join — if that law stood.
Here is how my Times colleagues in Kyiv described the day the law was overturned. “A crowd that had gathered outside Parliament only hours after explosions” from Putin’s drones “cheered when the vote was announced. Zinaida Averina, a 23-year-old consultant in green energy, has emerged as a key organizer of the protests. A newcomer to activism, she said she was spurred to action because she felt as though a ‘red line’ had been crossed toward autocracy. She started a small group chat on Telegram to coordinate with friends. It quickly swelled to about 3,000 members, becoming a hub for organizing protest actions.”
Marc Santora, one of The Times’s longest-serving reporters in Ukraine, described to me “a remarkable day” that started with “swarms of drones and missiles” in a Russian attack and ended with thousands celebrating their successful push to get Zelensky to change course. Marc and his colleagues posted a video dispatch that conveyed the euphoria.
My fellow Americans: These are the democracy-loving people whom Trump has been stiffing — in our name — in favor of his pal Putin. This is what I mean when I say Trump is “shunning” Ukrainian democracy to life. By favoring Putin and retreating from aiding Ukraine’s cause, he is forcing Ukrainians to double down on both creating and strengthening their own democratic advances.
One of Ukraine’s most influential journalists, Vitaliy Sych, remarked to me in Kyiv that what Ukrainians did in restoring their anticorruption laws “feels good for Ukraine.” But it left him “baffled and amazed by Americans,” who he said “gave up so easily and quickly and paved the way for an incompetent, exotic and destructive president.”
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook