For Donald Trump, there was a saving grace of his disastrous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2025—or perhaps this was the underlying purpose. "This is going to be great television,” he said.

That Trump is a master of the medium of television, as well as of social media, is not news. But much commentary on that Oval Office meeting missed that there was another master of those media in the room that day.

Like Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky built his successful presidential campaign on the back of his TV career. Like Trump, he was underestimated as a result.

Trump's TV success was often dismissed as being merely that of a "reality TV star", and Zelensky's success was often dismissed as merely that of an actor. That Ukraine elected as president the man who played the president in a sitcom was a joke on Ukraine, just as the fact that America elected as CEO the man who played a CEO in a reality TV show was a joke on America.

But Zelensky was not just an actor: he was a writer and producer. Like Trump, the medium was in his bones. Like Trump, that translated into a mastery of social media.

When Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border on Thursday February 24, 2022, it was expected that Russian victory would be a fait accompli before the West would be able to do anything about it. But a defiant selfie video shot by Zelensky with key aides on the Friday night changed all that. “We are all here,” he said to the camera. “Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here." It made it morally impossible for Western allies to abandon Ukraine. It may have been the single most influential social media post ever.

If the insight that Trump is good at television is well worn, James Chandler refreshes and sharpens that insight by tracing Trump's mastery of the medium to his love and knowledge of the particular genre of television that is kayfabe wrestling.

But given Zelensky's own mastery, when he found himself cast as the "heel" and not the "face" in his celebrity deathmatch with Trump and JD Vance, might he not have quickly realized—as quickly as Jon Stewart's team, which was more quickly than much of the international commentariat—what was going on?

Within days, Zelensky had issued a mollifying statement. Two months later, he and Trump had a private huddle on the sidelines of Pope Francis's funeral. A return meeting that August in the Oval Office was entirely cordial.

If kayfabe provides a valuable lens through which to analyze that meeting, a complementary lens is provided by something on perhaps the opposite end of the cultural spectrum: Thucydides.

That same afternoon as the Oval Office meeting, I happened to be presenting my stage adaptation of the Melian Dialogue by Thucydides at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, which I was visiting as writer-in-residence with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. The short drama was followed by a moderated discussion on geopolitics. The Trump-Zelensky meeting was not merely on topic, it seemed to directly reflect the key insight that Thucydides, in his dialogue, attributes to the Athenians: "The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must."

As a historical record, the Melian Dialogue is bleak. As Thucydides pithily records, the Athenians defeated the Melians, put the entire male population to death, and sold the women and children into slavery. Yet even as he documented this, Thucydides indulged in theatricality. The dialogue is the only part of his History of the Peloponnesian War that is written, as the name suggests, in dialogue. For some unrecorded reason, Thucydides chose to render only this moment in his 20-year narrative in the form of a script.

The lesson of the Dialogue, for Zelensky, would appear to be the same as that of kayfabe: he was powerless to overturn the brute realities of both Ukraine's dependence on US patronage and Trump's endless pursuit of "great television." But the lens that Thucydides provides is darker: it reminds us of the real-world stakes. Those stakes have become clearer in recent months, even as the Trump administration has seemed to be taking a lesson from Thucydides.

Indeed, Chandler's conclusion on the meaning of Trumpian kayfabe, via Barthes, could be channeling Thucydides: "transgression beyond the actual rules governing the situation—in this case, the rule of law itself, brazenly, shamelessly—need not be thought of as a problem so long as the retaliation is successful and the 'intelligible' spectacle of retributive justice is maintained."

At Trump's press conference on the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, he was asked what law the US attack was based on. “These are the iron laws that have always determined global power,” he answered. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller echoed this in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”, he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Canadian premier Mark Carney then quoted the Melian dialogue at Davos, grimly declaring a "rupture" with the previous paradigm of the international rules-based order. Trump has echoed the Thucydidean logic again on Greenland, Cuba and, of course, Iran. "The Iranians don't seem to realise they have no cards," he said in April, echoing his remark to Zelensky a year earlier: "You don't have the cards."

Trump and his acolytes would do well to pay more attention to that innate theatricality in Thucydides, however. Thucydides's History ends abruptly in the 20th year of the war, possibly because Thucydides died. At that point, Athens—they who had been responsible for what today would be called a genocide on the island of Melos—was on the verge of apparent collapse. Though they would fight on, they would be decisively defeated six years later. The Melians would be proved right: the failure by Athens to respect the norms of justice—rather than the retributive justice of kayfabe—would come back to haunt them.

"The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must." When Thucydides put these words in an Athenian mouth, he was not being a historian, but a dramatist. He was no more endorsing the sentiment than Shakespeare endorses a similar sentiment expressed by his anti-hero, Richard III:

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!

"I'm not playing cards", protested Zelensky, in the Oval Office. For Trump, though, everybody is always playing cards, and play-acting kayfabe—even as his administration role-plays Thucydides. It remains to be seen what lesson history will teach him.

Colin Murphy is a playwright, screenwriter and journalist from Dublin, Ireland, best known for his series of plays about Irish political history. His latest work, The United States vs Ulysses, is currently playing at the Irish Arts Center. A collection, Colin Murphy’s Political Plays, has just been published by Bloomsbury.