Nothing says standing up to Russian aggression quite like welcoming the aggressor on a red carpet and applauding him. On Friday, Donald Trump did both at the start of his summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. This triumphant greeting was followed by multiple friendly handshakes, a cordial pat or two on the arm, and a companionable stride past an enfilade of American F-22 fighter jets at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. When the pair got within shouting distance of the American press corps, a bit of harsh reality crept in. “President Putin, will you stop killing civilians?” someone called out. But, on the twelve-hundred-and-sixty-eighth day since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Putin and Trump never wavered from the chummy cordiality with which they had greeted each other for their first meeting in six years. Putin pantomimed not being able to hear the question and shrugged. In an instant, Trump ushered him away for an apparently impromptu ride in his Presidential limousine; pictures of the Beast rolling slowly toward the venue where their formal talks would be held showed Putin, through the window, grinning broadly.
When they emerged a little more than three hours later, after a shorter-than-expected session that did not include a scheduled lunch, the mutual admiration still flowed freely. Both men smiled. Trump gushed to the media about the “fantastic relationship” he’d always had with Putin and praised his “very profound” opening statement. Putin was, if anything, more over the top than Trump, praising the American President’s personal commitment to “pursuing peace,” as the logo projected on the stage behind them put it. Putin even played to Trump’s loathing of his predecessor, Joe Biden, adopting his talking point that the war with Ukraine never would have happened if Trump, not Biden, had been the American President. After twenty-five years in power, the former K.G.B. agent has learned well how to stroke the ego of his fifth U.S. counterpart.
What Putin did not offer, however, was what Trump has been demanding, without any success, for months: a ceasefire in Russia’s war with Ukraine. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump acknowledged in his brief remarks. While he spoke of “great progress” and Putin gestured at unspecified agreements that had been reached, “we didn’t get there,” Trump admitted. And that was it. After twelve minutes, and without a single question, the press conference adjourned, leaving stunned journalists to interpret the cryptic outcome: Was that really it, after all Trump’s hype?
Sometimes the news is what it seems to be, meaning, in this case: No deal. The day began with a hellish war in Ukraine, with air-raid sirens in Kyiv and fierce battles in the east, and that is how it ended. The only difference is that Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the “brotherly” Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska. The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer.
Right around the time that Trump was on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the following e-mail:
The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.
In the run-up to the meeting, debates raged about the right historical parallel to draw between this summit and its twentieth-century antecedents: Was it to be a replay of Yalta, with two great powers instead of three settling the fate of absent small nations, and with the United States once again signing off on Russia’s dominance over its neighbors? Or perhaps Munich was the better analogy, with Trump in the role of Neville Chamberlain, ceding a beleaguered ally’s territory as the price of an illusory peace? For Ukraine and its supporters in the West, the prospect of a sellout by Trump loomed large.
But history doesn’t repeat so neatly, and certainly not when Trump is involved. He is a sui-generis American President, who, at the end of the day, seemed to have orchestrated a self-own of embarrassing proportions. As ever, Trump’s big mouth offered up the best reminder of what he wanted in Alaska and what he did not get. On Friday morning, as Trump flew out of Washington aboard Air Force One, he told reporters, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But, after his long-sought meeting with Putin, as he again boarded Air Force One for the long flight home, this was the chyron on Fox News that greeted him: “No Ceasefire After Trump-Putin Summit.”
In the coming days, there will be endless explanations from Trump and his team as to why he didn’t get more out of the session. But, even in his post-summit interview with the great White House amplifier, Sean Hannity, the President struggled to alchemize the non-deal into Trumpian gold. “On a scale of one to ten,” Hannity asked the President, how would he grade the session? “The meeting was a ten in the sense that we got along great,” Trump responded. When Trump started talking, however, it was hardly about the summit at all, but about the “rigged election” in 2020 and how terrible Biden was and how he and Putin could have got so much done together if there had been no Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. Soon he was on to riffs about Iran and the border and his tariffs and how things in the U.S. are going so great that “Vladimir” told him, “Your country is hot as a pistol.” (Yeah, right.) On and on Trump went, about beating ISIS and why mail-in voting is terrible, about how big China is and how powerful America’s nuclear weapons are. Those tough-guy sanctions he once promised to place on Putin if he didn’t produce a deal weren’t so much as mentioned.
The more he talked about anything other than Russia, in fact, the more it was obvious: Even Trump knew he had bombed. “Now it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done,” he said at one point. If there’s one unwavering Law of Trump, this is it: Whatever happens, it is never, ever, his fault. ♦
