As if we needed another raging political controversy on a matter that begs for rational handling, one played out last Friday in full view of the whole world.

In a flash, the anticipated agreement between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — one that would have given the U.S. access to Ukraine’s mineral deposits and cemented the long-term relationship between the two countries — collapsed before our eyes. Worse, the face-plant took place in the Oval Office, on live TV, with the two leaders yelling at each other like adolescents in a schoolyard and no adults around to restore order. The outcome: deal not signed, Trump throwing Zelensky out of his office with no lunch, and the future very much in doubt.

It was not Trump’s finest hour, nor was it Zelensky’s. And despite the fresh air of transparency that we’ve already come to value in the new Trump presidency, this one was too transparent. My guess is that tough government-to-government negotiations are often nasty, head-knocking affairs, but all behind closed doors and always followed by both principals standing side by side, smiling broadly, and telling the world how productive their meeting had just been. Not this time.

As always, the spinmeisters dashed to the microphones to offer the world their own versions of what happened. Republicans immediately complimented Trump for standing up for our nation’s interests and American taxpayers’ hard-earned money. Meanwhile, Democrats saw exactly the opposite, pitching descriptors like the “Trump/Vance clown show” and berating the president and vice president for publicly humiliating the courageous Ukrainian leader and playing to Russian interests, not American ones.

So, what does the real scorecard look like? Here’s my take:

1.) The shouting match part, unpresidential and undiplomatic as it was, is largely irrelevant. The negotiations are not over for the simple reason that the underlying situation is intolerable and must be resolved. The war still goes on, Ukraine can’t go it alone, others won’t pick up the slack, and we (collectively) can’t let Russia clear the table and pick up all the pieces.

2.) Credit Trump for getting it this far. The Ukraine/Russia war has been an ongoing three-year nightmare, a stalemate chewing up well over a million human lives, destroying a once-vibrant country, and burning through fortunes. Until now, no American or foreign leader has done anything to stop it. Our own country just kept feeding the beast and protracting the carnage. Trump has been the first and only catalyst for closure.

3.) The notion that we are playing into Russian hands is, in my view, both premature and overstated. Sure, Russia is happy that the planned deal has collapsed (for now) and that the U.S. is threatening to abandon the Ukrainians. But do Trump critics really think that Trump scuttled the agreement that he had engineered just to curry favor from Russia?

And what is the American public’s view on all of this?

It seems impossible these days to separate rational considerations from angry, partisan reactions. Within moments of the Oval Office dustup, social media erupted in outrage. If you believe most of what you read online, that 15-minute screaming match marked the end of the world as we know it.

Arriving at the Sugarbush ski resort in Vermont on Saturday morning for a planned four-day vacation, Vice President JD Vance and family were greeted with a large, noisy demonstration, the streets lined with jeering protesters carrying signs suggesting they “go ski in Russia!” Intent on derailing the Vance family vacation, they succeeded. It turns out that the protest had been planned a week earlier, targeting the Trump regime’s aggressive funding cuts and hostility toward LGBTQ people. Evidently, these protesters simply hate Trump, hate Vance, and hate the new administration. They may or may not care about Ukraine, but they are happy to jump on any anti-Trump bandwagon.

But behind the din of hair-on-fire partisans, most Americans have a more sensible view. They are empathetic to Ukraine; they recognize that Russia is the aggressor, are disgusted by the savagery and brutality of Russia’s invasion, and have been and continue to be willing to help Ukraine. But at the same time, they recognize the downside consequences and utter futility of continuing to support a horribly destructive stalemate. Americans know that the killing must stop, and more and more agree every day with the president’s efforts to do that.

Final point: Once upon a time in our country, there was broad, if tacit, agreement that internal politics stop at the water’s edge. We kept our internal disagreements to ourselves. Unfortunately, today, we see many Democrat leaders pouncing on the opportunity to reprise their tired claims that Trump is Hitler, the destroyer of democracy, Putin’s puppet, and the like.

Leading those cheers on the world stage is, in my view, as improper as Trump’s Oval Office meltdown and harmful to America’s interest — and it won’t work internally. Give it a rest.

What’s next? That’s unknowable — but what is knowable is that a divorce between the U.S. and Ukraine would be bad for both. We need to find a way to fix the breach and stop the killing.