Conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot saw the excited high-five and hand-shake between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). It prompted him to note that it seems as if the "tyrants" of the world are laughing at the American president.
Boot recalled all of the international meetings Trump has attended in the past two years, and each one has a "cringeworthy" moment of humiliation. Surprisingly, that didn't happen this time. Trump kept mostly to himself, canceling meetings for informal conversations. His "deal" with China was to cave on his increase in tariffs, at least for the next 90 days. Boot noted that Trump even said something appropriate when he was told former President George H.W. Bush had died.
Yet, Trump was still the butt of jokes to some, Boot noted.
The iconic handshake reminded Boot of "the classic David Low cartoon after the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 showing Hitler and Stalin curtsying to each other, with Hitler saying, 'The scum of the earth, I believe,' and Stalin replying, 'The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?'"
While the two men aren't exactly Hitler and Stalin, they still have blood on their hands, Boot wrote.
Trump's decision not to meet with Putin over the Ukraine takeover didn't make Trump seem stronger, given that the two spent a dinner together.
"It signals American weakness that will encourage Putin to transgress further," Boot wrote. "Likewise, denying overwhelming evidence of Mohammed bin Salman’s complicity in Khashoggi’s murder signals that Trump isn’t tough enough to hold his ally to account."
MBS spent the G20 "thumbing his nose at the United States" while he laughed with Putin, Boot wrote.
"He was also undercutting one of the chief rationales that Trump offers for his obsequiousness to Mohammed — the Saudis’ opposition to Iran — given that Russia is Iran’s chief ally," he observed.
All Putin must do is giggle at the "two American ships" that couldn't make it through the Kerch Strait. The ships weren't actually from the U.S military, but that's neither here nor there.
All in all, the G20 could have been much worse, Boot argued, but it doesn't matter because they've been laughing for quite some time.