As the media and Democrats fulminate over President Trump’s supposed capitulation to Vladimir Putin, precisely the opposite seems to be happening.

But leave it to the media and the Left to deliberately misinterpret what is going on.

On Monday, President Trump met with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, along with a bunch of European leaders.

Everything seems to be moving toward Ukrainian territorial concessions in return for serious security guarantees for Ukraine.

Those guarantees would presumably be some form of European trigger force in Ukraine that would implicate a mutual defense pact. It wouldn’t exactly be NATO, but it would be NATO-lite. The problem is that to be a credible deterrent, you need tens of thousands of troops.

The second possibility is a trip-wire force that would trigger the possibility of the mutual defense coming into effect if Russia were to walk across the border.

A third possibility would be a kind of observer force, perhaps a few hundred troops or so, to report on incoming military action, which could be accomplished with satellites and ground cameras.

Of course, all of this flies in the face of the fact that Russia wants to leave Ukraine utterly defenseless and prostrate before them.

But here’s the thing: The fact that President Trump is willing to hold Russia’s feet to the fire by even talking about these kinds of significant security guarantees is a major move from the president, and pretending that it’s a pro-Russia move is silly. If there were a significant security guarantee, a sort of NATO-lite and Article Five-lite approach to Ukraine in exchange for territorial concessions in Donbas, that would be a masterstroke from the president of the United States, because otherwise this war just keeps going.

All of Trump’s forward movement on this issue is to the great consternation of both the media and the Democrats, who claim that Donald Trump was a Putin catspaw. They thought that Trump was going to welcome Zelensky to the White House yesterday by berating him and telling him he needed to basically surrender in the war: No security guarantees, no economic health, no nothing.

None of that happened. In fact, it was pretty warm. You could see Trump and Zelensky getting along. This was not an antagonistic meeting.

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One of the things that Zelensky also said is that as part of any of the security guarantees put forward by Europe and the United States, Ukraine would buy $90 billion in American weapons via Europe. The rest of the NATO nations and the United States military would benefit from it. The defense industries in the United States would end up benefiting from that. He expressed gratitude to both President Trump as well as the EU leaders for their hard work on the possibility of a peace deal.

There are still a lot of steps to go. We still have to see whether Vladimir Putin actually is interested in ending the war in any serious way.

As I’ve said before, a good thing about President Trump is that he’s heterodox in his views, which means he does very creative things. But if things don’t happen, he will respond. He’s responsive. He doesn’t just stick with an idea, no matter what.

The idea that endless diplomacy is something that President Trump is going to pursue here is not true. If Russia does not come to the table, if he feels that Putin is jacking him around again, he’ll walk away. He is not going to be bullied by Vladimir Putin here.

Trump remains optimistic, saying that he thinks that Putin wants to make a deal.

For the media and the Left to pretend that somehow Trump is doing Putin’s work here is to ignore everything that’s actually going on in favor of a pre-established narrative.

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Even Michael McFaul, who was President Obama’s Russian ambassador, admitted that Trump is actually doing a pretty good job here. “I think this was a very positive meeting,” he said. “And whoever had the idea to bring all these European leaders together, in addition to President Zelensky, that was a brilliant, brilliant idea. And having it come so quickly after Alaska was also very important because now they’ve changed the talking points here. Just in this meeting alone, they’ve walked back some of the positions that the president was echoing, when he met with President Putin. So this is very positive progress.”

If you’re honest —even if you’re a Democrat — you should be acknowledging that President Trump not only is not doing anything wrong here, he’s actually moving the ball forward.

To pretend that this was somehow a gigantic Trump capitulation to Putin is to ignore the actual reality of the situation, and it demonstrates the wild disconnect between reality and what Democrats think of President Trump.

But then, Democrats and reality are like oil and water.