Ukraine appeals to Trump’s vanity in hopes of security guarantees

In the most recent example of his vanity project, the State Department will soon be issuing limited edition passports featuring the president’s face to commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary. When Americans travel abroad, they will have Trump’s face in their pockets.

The president’s egomania is not a source of strength. It is a vulnerability that the world has learned to exploit. Foreign and domestic leaders alike know that one of the best ways to move Trump is flattery — and to present him with gifts bearing his name. 

In the case of Ukraine, which is fighting an existential battle for survival against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, this reportedly means a proposal to name a 50 mile-long and 40 mile-wide portion of the Donbas, a strategic — and contested — region on the country’s Russian border, after Trump. Four people who are familiar with the negotiations, speaking anonymously to the New York Times, confirmed that the proposal is real.

The very notion of “Donnyland,” as the area would be called, is surreal, like something out of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” or Woody Allen’s “Bananas.” That the absurd is now routine is a defining feature of the Age of Trump.

The name, a play on the prefix in the region and Trump’s names, started as a joke. A Ukrainian negotiator first suggested it, “partly in jest,” as a way to pressure the Trump administration into taking a stronger stance against Russia’s demands for territory.

Times reporters Anton Troianovski and Andrew E. Kramer captured the dystopic contrast. “That a name evocative of Disneyland has been applied to a depopulated, decimated swath of Ukrainian coal-and-steel country could appear jarring as Europe’s deadliest fighting since World War II continues to rage,” they wrote. “But it also reflects a global reality in which governments appeal to Mr. Trump’s vanity in order to get American might on their side.”

The pair reports that a Ukrainian negotiator even created a green and gold Donnyland flag — and a national anthem using ChatGPT. There is no confirmation that the American negotiating team saw them, and according to reports, Donnyland has not yet been formalized in official Ukrainian documents. 

With part of the Donbas held by Russia, the region occupies an important security front for Ukraine, which controls the territory that could soon become Donnyland. Under a negotiated settlement that divided up the Donbas, Donnyland would be on the front lines of any future invasion of the country by Russia and, according to the Times, some “see a security benefit” in having a demilitarized zone named for Trump, who has been friendly to Putin.

Alternate proposals would make Donnyland into an economic development zone — a city-state like Monaco on the French Mediterranean that could be semiautonomous. Such an arrangement could appeal to the president’s brand as the ultimate deal maker and billionaire businessman.

The stakes are high. Since Trump met with Putin in Alaska in August, his administration has repeatedly signaled a willingness to accept a peace deal that requires Ukraine to withdraw to the administrative border of the Donetsk region in the southern Donbas, which would mean giving Russia the remaining 30% of the territory (roughly 3,500 square miles). This would be a huge concession to Russia and Putin, effectively rewarding its war of aggression.  

With the Donbas remaining as a sticking point in its peace negotiations Russia, Ukraine is doing what other leaders have done to secure Trump’s — and America’s — security guarantees and other support.

In 2018, then-Polish president Andrzej Duda proposed building a U.S. military base named “Fort Trump” as a deterrent against Russian aggression. Trump was excited by the proposal. “[Duda] offered us much more than $2 billion to do this,” he said, “and so we’re looking at it.” Citing concerns about funding and where the base would be located, the administration abandoned plans for “Fort Trump” in 2020.

Benjamin Netanyahu has also flattered Trump with land named for him. In 2019, the Israeli prime minister created a settlement in the disputed Golan Heights territory and named it “Trump Heights.” On his Truth Social platform in February 2025, the president shared a video that appeared to have been made using generative artificial intelligence depicting Gaza as a resort featuring one of his luxury hotels and a huge gold statue of himself. Netanyahu endorsed the takeover idea as something that potentially “could change history,” and his praise of Trump seems to have proved important in convincing the president to partner with him in waging war against Iran, which has long been a goal of the Israeli prime minister.

Flattery moves Donald Trump. But he is quick to anger when his ego and vanity are wounded. When combined with his short attention span and little interest in the hard work of governance, these qualities are imperiling America’s democracy at home and its influence abroad — a “superpower suicide” that is unfolding on the mantle of the president’s vanity.

“I see Donald Trump as representing the quintessential narcissist,” Jerrold Post, the late CIA chief psychological profiler, told me in 2019. “Using that phrase, though, is not to make a diagnosis, but [just] to say he has a preponderance of these traits.”

When Trump entered office in 2017, he dismissed the intricacies of foreign policy, viewing diplomacy as something resembling a real estate deal. But as Post pointed out, “negotiating foreign policy is different from negotiating how to buy a skyscraper.”

As if proving Post’s analysis, Trump, with Vice President JD Vance as his wing man, acted like an unhinged TV show host as he tried to humiliate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his February 2025 White House visit. In an unprecedented — at least in terms of being acted out in full view of the public — scene in the Oval Office, the president mocked how his Ukrainian counterpart dressed and tried to bully him into accepting an unfair deal with Russia. He also demanded that Ukraine surrender hundreds of billions of dollars in mineral rights and access to oil, gas and other resources to “repay” America for assistance provided to the country during the war.

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Trump appeared to have no respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty and the blood sacrifice its people have made — estimated at upwards of 500,000 to 600,000 dead, wounded and missing — in their freedom struggle against the Russian invaders. When Zelenskyy stood up to Trump and Vance on behalf of Ukraine and his own personal dignity, he was sent packing by the president. (Zelenskyy eventually relented and signed a modified deal that included revenue sharing and a joint redevelopment fund.)

The hostility on display that day in the Oval Office illustrated what Post called the president’s “grandiosity” obscuring a deep insecurity and fragility, a “trait [that is] associated with extreme sensitivity.”

We saw this most recently when Trump erupted at Iran’s leaders for failing to surrender as their country was being pummeled by the U.S. and Israel. He repeatedly threatened to destroy Iran and commit crimes against humanity by “bombing the country back to the stone ages” and destroying key parts of its civilian infrastructure, including power-generating plants. He even boasted that it was an honor to kill Iran’s leaders, and that he would like to kill more of them.

With the president’s egomania, need for praise and belligerence driving his foreign policy, Post’s observations have only grown more urgent since Trump returned to office in 2025.

“In a major crisis, be it military, international or domestic, it will not bring out the best in a person like Donald Trump,” he said. “A narcissistic leader will instead focus on protecting his historic legacy and ego. Because [he] is so volatile, he can easily miscalculate and have something horrible happen. There is a major danger of miscalculation…because of his need to focus on, ‘What does this do for me?’ Some crises are personal opportunities for Donald Trump.”

America’s friends, including Ukraine, and enemies like Russia know that Trump is malleable and easily manipulated. Tell him what he wants to hear, give him gifts and name things after him, and you will be much more likely to get what you want. 

For all his immense power, Trump still yearns for any affirmation that he is the Great Man of history, and he will do almost anything to achieve it. He wants praise, attention and a Nobel Peace Prize, even if it means betraying Ukraine to Russia. Absent that, Donnyland could be an attractive consolation prize.