New book alleges treasury secretary called Zelensky ‘special-needs child’

2 days ago by MicroWave to c/world

The comments were allegedly made before the Ukrainian president's fiery visit to the Oval Office in February 2025.

A forthcoming book chronicling the first year of Donald Trump's second administration alleges that his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, made a series of disparaging remarks about Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of the Ukrainian president's visit to the White House early last year.

Regime Change was co-authored by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, based on "hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration's most closely guarded rooms," according to the Simon & Schuster website. It is set to be published on Tuesday, June 23.

According to excerpts published by The Guardian on Saturday, Bessent referred to Zelensky as a "little f****r" and a "special-needs child for the Europeans," and called him "Mr. Bean on crack."

BarneyPiccolo 40 points 2 days ago

Look who's talking. Every member of this MAGA administration is a special needs child.

path: 0 24369605, hotness: undefined, score: 40, children: 0
ikidd 14 points a day ago

That's rich coming from Scott Bessent. He's possibly the dumbest one of that pack of imbeciles.

path: 0 24372648, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 2
phutatorius 4 points a day ago

That might be true, and it's pretty hard to out-dumb Witkoff, or even worse, Trump.

path: 0 24372648 24376705, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 1
ikidd 1 point 8 hours ago

It's such a hard thing to figure out who is the biggest idiot in that bunch. I mean, KegsBreath put a reporter in the Invasion-In-Progress signal group and quoted Pulp Fiction like a gospel text. It's hard to beat that level of concentrated stupidity.

path: 0 24372648 24376705 24390506, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
breezeblock 11 points a day ago

What a terrible basket of deplorable people

path: 0 24371978, hotness: undefined, score: 11, children: 0
cecilkorik 5 points a day ago

Projecting their own insecurities onto other people seems to be a hallmark of this administration. I would argue it's a guilty conscience perhaps if I thought they had one.

path: 0 24375528, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0
homes 4 points a day ago

Another obvious case of the Nazi trying to deminishthe not-Nazi.

Because he obviously knew that his physician was the Nazi position, and he wanted everyone to pick his Nazi position rather than the not-Nazi position.

Hopefully, most people are not stupid enough to listen to him and pick the not-Nazi position

And fuck everyone who sided with his Nazi position, which is extremely obvious and transparent

path: 0 24373624, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
world
world

@lemmy.world

login for more options
56676
33150
10948

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

  • Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:

    • Post news articles only
    • Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
    • Title must match the article headline
    • Not United States Internal News
    • Recent (Past 30 Days)
    • Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
  • Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.

  • Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.

  • Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.

  • Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025

  • Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

  • Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.

  • Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/...

  • Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link

go to feed...