Trump Got Owned

At the joint press event yesterday, Putin spoke first. This may sound like nothing. But it was an enormous power move, which the Trump team must idiotically have agreed to. To my knowledge, no American president has ever let it happen before.

It would be like a lawyer speaking first at a trial, rather than the judge. Or like a graduate speaking first at commencement, pre-empting the university president. It simply would not occur. Maybe Trump, in his entertainment-world role, was thinking of Putin as the “warm-up act”? I can guarantee that the event was not viewed that way in any foreign ministry around the world.

Then, after he had kicked off the event by taking the mic, Putin went on to establish even more clearly who was boss. He spoke at great length—more than twice as long as Trump eventually did. Trump’s eventual response was his usual ramble, rather than Putin’s prepared and crafted discourse. Putin can speak English, but he did not deign even to utter a few pleasantries in that language—while speaking on American soil. (He could have said, but didn’t: “I am grateful to the president and the people of the United States”²). Instead he plowed straight ahead, all in Russian. He “framed” the Ukraine issue entirely on Russian terms, starting with its “root causes,” which boil down to his familiar argument that Russia deserves to control Ukraine.

Putin’s last fillip, inviting Trump to have their next meeting in Moscow—seemingly unscripted and delivered in English, so everyone would understand it—clearly caught Trump off guard. With this minor bit of event-planning—who talks when—Putin took a step ahead of Trump’s team, and a thousand steps ahead of Trump himself.

Donald Trump will back a plan to cede unoccupied Ukrainian territory to Russia to secure an end to the war between the two countries, it was reported on Saturday, after details of his post-summit call with European leaders leaked out.

Trump told European leaders that he believed a peace deal could be negotiated if the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, agreed to give up the Donbas region, which Russian invaders have not been able to seize in over three years of fighting, the New York Times reported, citing to two senior European officials.

Two sources with direct knowledge of the talks in Alaska told the Guardian that Putin demanded Ukraine withdraw from Donbas, which is made up of the Donestk and Luhansk regions, as a condition for ending the war, but offered Trump a freeze along the remaining frontline.