'Exhausted' Trump 'seemed defeated' after brief encounter with Putin: columnist

Instead of coming away with progress being made toward a ceasefire in Ukraine, Donald Trump flew home from Alaska looking every bit his age after getting “played” by Vladimir Putin.

In his column for the Daily Beast, commentator David Rothkopf suggested that not only did the president fail to make any progress, based upon what was discussed at a press conference that was scheduled to last for an hour, but ended after only 12 minutes, but the president exposed himself as not being the force of nature he seems to believe he is.

According to Rothkopf, the president attended the summit with the “long-term goal” of getting ”Russian president Vladimir Putin to publicly support a series of lies that are now crucial to both Trump’s own deluded sense of himself and to his fake public narrative about who he is.”

That was achieved by Trump, along with a creating a distraction to get the Jeffrey Epstein files firestorm off the front pages, but little else that could be considered a positive.

Instead, Rothkopf wrote, “Trump framed himself as the host of the summit. But Putin was the center of attention, the person who spoke first at the post-event press conference, the one who was clearly setting the rules going forward.”

“There was a pathos to the whole event because if you watched closely, particularly during the closing press conference, it appeared Trump understood this as well,” he wrote. “He was low-energy. He seemed defeated. He was going through the motions. In fact, in a predictable irony, the 79-year-old Trump appeared to be just the president he asserted Joe Biden would’ve become had he been reelected, too old for the job, not up to the challenge, more elderly than he has ever appeared to be while on the world stage.”

He suggested the president may have finally realized his limitations.

“If you looked into the resignation and bewilderment in his eyes as he scuttled off the stage at Elmendorf, you couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t starting to think it will be easier to returning to the kind of low-level grift that is his main line of work when he is in the one place in the world he least likes to be…the one place he knows awaits all shallow, all-sizzle-no-substance TV personalities like him … and that is off camera,” he suggested.

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