Donald Trump Jr., the U.S. president’s eldest son, told a Middle East conference that his father could pull the United States back from the war in Ukraine.
In an extended speech questioning the very need for continued fighting, Trump Jr. claimed that wealthy and “corrupt” Ukrainians had left the country, leaving behind what he described as “the group they viewed as the peasant class” to wage the war.
Although he holds no official role around Donald Trump, Trump Jr. remains a central figure in the Maga movement. His remarks reflect the distrust some in Trump’s circle feel toward Ukraine’s leadership and came as Trump’s negotiators press Kyiv for territorial concessions.
According to Trump Jr., Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is deliberately prolonging the conflict, knowing that once the war ends he will struggle to win an election. He said Zelensky is treated almost as a deity by the left flank, yet insisted that corruption in Ukraine is far worse than in Russia.
He also criticized EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, arguing that European sanctions are ineffective because they have merely driven up oil prices, enabling Russia to fund its war effort. He summed up the European approach as “we’ll wait for Russia to go bankrupt—this is not a plan.”
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Trump Jr. said that while campaigning during the 2022 elections, he encountered only three people who viewed the war in Ukraine as a top-ten priority. In his words, the possibility that boats from Venezuela could bring fentanyl into the United States poses “a far more obvious and immediate danger than anything happening in Ukraine or Russia.”
He also claimed, without offering evidence, that during a visit to Monaco last summer he supposedly saw that nearly half the supercars—Bugattis, Ferraris and the like—carried Ukrainian plates. “Do you think that money was earned in Ukraine?” he said.
“We hear all these rumors about what’s going on when we see every license plate in Monaco being Ukrainian […] the wealthy left, leaving what they viewed as the peasant class to fight. There was no incentive to stop the war because as long as the money kept flowing and they were stealing, no one checked anything, and there was no reason to look for peace.”
Asked whether his father—who has pledged to bring peace to Ukraine—might instead simply withdraw U.S. involvement from the conflict, Trump Jr. replied that such a scenario cannot be ruled out, stressing that Donald Trump remains one of the most unpredictable figures in politics. He added that the United States no longer intends to be “the idiot with a checkbook.”