Last night, after he opened the envelope and called out Penn’s name, presenter Kieran Culkin was forced to apologetically carry the statue offstage himself. The reason for this, it transpires, is that Penn may have had a prior commitment in Ukraine. After rumours suggested that the actor may have flown out to an undisclosed part of the country late last week, he was photographed in central Kyiv on Monday “wearing sunglasses and carrying a box of cigarettes”. After that, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy posted a picture of them sitting together in his office.

Hilarious that even as Trump and other Republicans are trying to sink the idea of Ukraine as culturally relevant to the US and an ally we should support, that in the precise moment they should be at the zenith of their power they are still total utter losers who nobody likes and an overwhelming majority in the US put a middle finger up to as loudly as possible.

I post this to emphasize how easily this makes Sean Penn look cooler, not because it truly meaningfully impacts Ukraine compared to actual, you know, real things happening other than a famous person having photos taken, but rather because it shows how false the narrative is that Ukraine is not seen as an ally to the average US person, that the average person in the US agrees even remotely with the world view of their government, Republican or Democrat.

Trump’s job here is to thwart the desire of the US people to support Ukraine, and that is a fragile condition to maintain because it is so obviously unpopular with the US public and the more obvious it is Trump and Republicans are trying to do it, the increasingly more unpopular it will become.