Donald Trump traveled to Alaska to secure a golden platform for his bid to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, after his meeting with Vladimir Putin intended to achieve a cease-fire between Ukraine and Russia, he appears to be a shoe-in for the Ignoble Award for reincarnating Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler over the future of Czechoslovakia.
The Russian spymaster played him. He shifted Trump’s massive body into submission, getting him to back off his repeated threats of extreme sanctions if Russia did not agree to a cease-fire. No doubt, Putin prepared for meeting Trump, right down to the nickname Trump has earned as a TACO (Trump always chickens out).
Trump told Sean Hannity after the summit, “In the sense we got along great, and it’s good when two big powers get along, especially when they’re nuclear powers. We’re No. 1 and they’re No. 2 in the world.”
Trump failed to use his position of superiority to sell Putin on a cease-fire. Instead, I’m not sure Putin had to use all his skills as a spymaster to turn Trump into mush.
He fed Trump’s ego. The “great negotiator” capitulated. Putin fed Trump all of his embittered talking points about being robbed in the 2020 election. That it was rigged. He burnished Trump’s abhorrence of mail-in ballots.
As he did in previous summits, Trump swallowed Putin’s words as gospel, not those of his own first-term attorney general and countless election, cybersecurity and judicial officials in the months and years after 2020.
Trump is so obsessed with securing “peace in our time” that he has forgotten who started the war in Ukraine, who seized Crimea from Ukraine, who invaded Georgia under false genocide propaganda.
Trump plays the bully when dealing with almost every world leader, corporate titan, university head. But with Putin he is an admiring sycophant.
Come Monday, Trump will turn into a bully once more as he meets with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky who he has now tasked with conceding land to Russia as part of an overall peace plan. He has the power to withhold armaments, intelligence, medical supplies if Zelensky does not comply with his demands, that is, Putin’s demands.
I wonder what Zelensky will wear to his meeting with Trump. In a previous White House visit, Zelensky wore stylish black battle fatigues as a sign of support for his armed forces. Trump and his minions disparaged him for disrespecting the Oval Office.
Trump is a fan of Winston Churchill. I wonder what Trump would have said about Churchill wearing military attire—a so-called “siren suit”—to his meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt?
But then, Trump is not a student of history. Anything that does not align with his “reality” is “history,” as in no longer important or does not exist, as Zelensky and Ukraine, indeed, the rest of the world, are about to find out.
***No A.I. was used in the writing and editing of this post. The only intelligence employed was my own.***