Two peace plans, two philosophies, and one awkward overlap at Mar-a-Lago

Photo: AP Images

W

hen Volodymyr Zelensky flew to Mar-a-Lago this week to meet Donald Trump, he didn’t come empty-handed. This time, he brought a counterproposal.

Much time has passed since the first 24-hour window during which Trump was supposed to end the war, and the White House is now signaling impatience with open-ended conflict, while Zelensky is signaling realism about who now holds leverage. The result: two peace plans, two philosophies, and one awkward overlap at Mar-a-Lago.

Zelensky arrived with a 20-point plan that reads like a survival manual. It’s tighter than his earlier frameworks, less rhetorical, and designed to answer skeptical Americans asking what “winning” even means anymore. The core message is that Ukraine wants peace, but not a ceasefire they see doubling as a countdown clock.

His plan insists on four things. No permanent territorial concessions, even if final borders are addressed later. Binding security guarantees — real ones, not diplomatic fortune cookies. Accountability, meaning war crimes investigations and reconstruction paid for with frozen Russian assets. And global stability provisions: food corridors, energy infrastructure, and nuclear safety, all pitched as everyone else’s problem, too.

Trump’s original 28-point framework, by contrast, is built like a deal sheet. It’s broader, faster, and far less sentimental about legal symmetry. Trump prioritizes an immediate ceasefire, accepts that “facts on the ground” exist whether lawyers like them or not, and leans heavily on leverage.

Think of Zelensky’s plan like a guardrail and Trump’s plan like a stopwatch. Where Zelensky wants guarantees before peace, Trump wants peace before guarantees. Where Ukraine focuses on justice, Trump focuses on stopping the slaughter. His extra eight points live in the gray areas: sequencing concessions, applying pressure to both sides, and making clear that endless war is no longer an option on the table.

The difference is that Zelensky is trying to make peace durable, while Trump is trying to make peace immediate. One plan is defensive, shaped by trauma and distrust. The other is transactional, shaped by impatience and power.

So Trump and Zelensky sat down, got along, discussed their respective plans and signed the guestbook. But Mar-a-Lago didn’t produce peace. It produced a standoff between doctrine and dealmaking. Between one side that wants permanence and another that wants progress. And somewhere between the two, a war waits for no one.

The FBI’s Midlife Crisis: Now With Fewer Leaks and a Moving Truck

ASPresident Donald Trump approaches his first year back in office, the FBI and DOJ find themselves in unfamiliar territory: governing without obsession. For nearly a decade, their institutional posture was defined by reaction. Everything was a response to Trump, a counter to Trump or about containing Trump. He was the constant reference point, the justification for urgency and the rationale for legal innovation.

With Trump no longer the existential threat but the sitting president, that framework has collapsed. Now the agencies are left with a quieter, more uncomfortable task. They have to relearn how to enforce the law without making Trump the center of gravity.

That’s why the FBI’s decision to leave its longtime J. Edgar Hoover headquarters matters more than any speech about reform ever could. The FBI doesn’t move buildings lightly. Sure, it raids buildings. It surveils buildings. It subpoenas buildings. It does not, as a rule, abandon them.

Why now? Because institutions don’t relocate when they’re confident. They relocate when they’re recalibrating.

More than just packing boxes, the FBI is packing away an era. Turning out the lights there is a signal flare: We are not being that FBI anymore.

Well, at least, that’s the aspiration.

Under director Kash Patel, the Bureau has been moving more agents out into the field while putting their desks up for sale.

It’s an attempt to remember what the FBI looked like before it became a recurring character in American politics. This is an FBI that looks to spend more time going after fraud, espionage, counterterrorism, and violence, and less time trying to lock up political opponents under the pretense of “saving democracy.”

So far, there have been no high-profile arrests of Trump’s political opponents. Neither dramatic reversals nor cathartic moments for a base that spent years watching creative prosecutions, novel theories, and prosecutorial urgency deployed in one direction only. To MAGA world, that silence feels like a rerun. They clearly remember voting for heads on spikes, not Season Two of Trust the Process, now streaming indefinitely.

Attorney Jim Trusty, a former DOJ insider, doesn’t describe this moment as failure. “Daylight is overdue,” he tells Mishpacha, speaking of past FBI and DOJ conduct, but he’s careful about what that daylight should look like. Accountability, yes, but not revenge dressed up as law enforcement.

Trusty actually praises the symbolism of closing the FBI headquarters, calling it “good messaging.” Buildings, he argues, shape behavior. The old headquarters taught agents that proximity to Washington mattered. Leaving it behind is a way of saying the center of gravity is shifting away from politics, away from leaks, back toward cases.

Trusty speaks with unusual credibility because he saw the system at full strain. A partner at Ifrah Law, Trusty represented Donald Trump through both the January 6 investigation and the Mar-a-Lago case, giving him a front-row seat to how the FBI and DOJ operate when hyperbolic, hyper-partisan hypocrisy attempted to take down a former president. Trusty says “silence doesn’t mean nothing’s happening.” It can mean prosecutors are trying very hard not to become the mirror image of the thing they’re trying to move past.

That shift is visible, if unsatisfying. Take Minnesota, where allegations of massive fraud in the tens of billions have finally drawn federal scrutiny. Trusty says cases like that are exactly where the FBI should be spending its time: clear money trails, real victims, no need for legal gymnastics.

Still, patience is a hard sell to a movement that remembers how fast the system could move when it wanted to. Trusty understands the nervousness. He also understands the danger of overcorrection. If the FBI and DOJ respond to past excesses with mirrored excesses, they don’t restore credibility; they confirm everyone’s worst suspicions.

In the process of trying to find itself, the FBI has left the building… and booked itself a vacation to Minnesota.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1093)