Tuesday was a dark day for the United States. President Donald Trump and his administration embraced Russia as a peace partner without demanding that it pay any price for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. And then, in a statement that turned morality upside down, the president blamed Ukraine for causing the war.

Trump is an outrage-generating machine. He appears to take perverse pleasure in saying things that shock, and I normally ignore the daily presidential detonation. But this time was different. The tragic loss of life in Ukraine will mean nothing - and a true resolution of the conflict will be impossible - if we can’t distinguish between the attacker and the victim.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump said of the nation that was attacked on Feb. 24, 2022, by a Russian leader who had declared that Ukraine deserved no independence or sovereignty because it wasn’t a “real country.” Vladimir Putin’s casus belli was a chilling act of dehumanization, and it was followed by a brutal assault that would have succeeded but for the brave resistance of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people.

Those are the moral and strategic issues at the center of the conflict. But somehow, in Trump’s monomania, the war is about him. He has said often, with no evidence, that Russia wouldn’t have invaded if he had been president. Now, he’s claiming Ukraine spurned his help and brought this existential fight upon itself.

“I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down.

But they chose not to do it that way,” Trump said.

What can he be talking about? Trump had left the White House more than a year before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Zelensky was eager to negotiate a real peace deal with Russia while Trump was president, overeager, perhaps. But nothing came of it because Putin wanted conquest, not compromise.

Trump compounded the quarrel with Zelensky with a snide social media post on Wednesday in which he called the Ukrainian leader “a Dictator without Elections,” who “had better move fast or he is not going to have a country.” Even Zelensky’s leading domestic rival, former president Petro Poroshenko, agrees that elections are unwise while the war is going on, but that evidently doesn’t matter to Trump.

The president has effectively made Zelensky his adversary and, implicitly, moved toward open embrace of Russia’s anti-Zelensky line. His words are also likely to leave deep scars in Ukraine. One retired U.S. Army officer who’s working in Kyiv sent me an anguished message on Wednesday: “What the hell is happening in America? From here, we look like we’ve lost our minds. We’re not just losing our standing with current leaders but we’re losing the next generation who are watching and learning that America cannot be trusted.”

Trump’s fact-free outburst is doubly unfortunate because it undermines what seems to me the good work being done by his subordinates to think about a “fair, enduring, sustainable” peace, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it Tuesday in Saudi Arabia. The two essential issues in this negotiation, as national security adviser Michael Waltz rightly said, will be territory and security guarantees. Ukraine will have to give up some land - if, and only if, it gets assurances that Russia won’t attack again.

I wish Rubio and Waltz hadn’t met their Russian counterparts in Riyadh so soon and on such an equal footing, ignoring the war crimes that Russia has committed. But that’s a disagreement in judgment. At some point, the United States needed to sit down again with Russia and think about a path forward. The Russians, true to form, seemed to be smirking before the formal meeting, as if they had gotten away with something. Indeed, they had.

But once a decision was made to go forward as the administration chose, a confident president would keep his mouth shut while his deputies do the preliminary work of preparing what will be a complicated negotiation. Trump needs to leave them alone as they work with Ukraine and Europe to see whether they can craft a stable agreement that would bring peace after three horrific years of combat, for the benefit of all. If he conducts a daily “weave” on top of the negotiations, splicing in his personal beefs and grudges, the process will become an impossible tangle.

Trump has it right that the time has come to end this terrible war. He put the pieces in place and began the process. But then his monstrous ego became involved, and the peacemaking became bogged down in nonsense. This president, it must be said, is his own worst enemy. If he truly wants peace in Ukraine, he should follow the first rule for negotiators: In public, just shut up.

David Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist.