I don’t know why, but few are saying what’s plainly obvious about the president’s “summit” with his Russian counterpart. He’s afraid of him.
Donald Trump made all kinds of noise about “severe consequences” that Vladimir Putin would face if he did not agree to a ceasefire with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the war in Ukraine.
Trump created conditions, however feeble they may have seemed, in which he appeared to negotiate from a position of strength. “I’ve solved six wars in the last six months,” he said before the trip — all lies.
Then, when the moment came, nothing. Trump got nothing.
Not so for Putin.
“The extraordinary meeting at Anchorage’s Elmendorf Air Force base has ended Putin’s pariah status and brought Washington’s stance on the war closer to Moscow’s,” the Financial Timesreported.
“And Putin did not need to budge an inch.”
Liberals and Democrats tend to think Trump gets along with Putin due to them being birds of a feather. Putin is a strongman. Trump is a strongman. Both love power. Both hate liberal democracy. While true, that doesn’t explain the president’s dramatic heel-turn.
But fear does.
The White House clearly believed it was important, not only for the meeting but for the president’s image at home, for him to look strong beforehand. Professor Heather Cox Richardson has the context:
“US envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.”
But then, Putin said “Not gonna happen.” Moreover, Putin said Trump really got a raw deal with the 2020 election. He totally won. So unfair! And with that combo of flex and flattery, Putin “got what he wanted — to play for time and press his military advantage over Ukraine,” exiled Russian political scientist Ilya Matveyev told the Financial Times.
Here’s how it looked to Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich: “The way that it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. And it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”
She went on:
“Of course, that is only the piece of the picture we have right now and certainly President Trump, who is the host and who is the president, would not want to enable something that would make him look weak.”
Too late.
Now the president can be “safely ignored,” Anne Applebaum wrote.
“If the US is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the US president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored,” she said.
She even enumerated the moments of disgrace.
“It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy … misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”
I don’t know if Putin has something on the president (kompromat). I don’t know if Trump is in Putin’s pocket. I can speculate, but I don’t know. What I do know is Trump talked a good game and choked. I know he humiliated himself and America. And I know something else.
All this is rooted in cowardice. It’s safe to attack friends, because they won’t fight back, because they’re friends, but it’s not safe to attack enemies, because they will fight back, and because they are enemies.
Trump’s MO has always been to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, safe in the knowledge that no one has the will to stop him. That holds up as long as the “no one” in question is American or an American ally. Actual enemies, though? Nuh-uh.
A few months ago, Trump was “very tough” with Zelensky in the Oval Office. He was less “tough” with him on Monday, but Trump knows Zelensky will never fight back, as Zelensky needs America’s support to defeat an even more malicious opponent.
But Putin?
He gets smiles, handshakes, the red-carpet treatment. He gets photos of himself riding in “The Beast” with the United States president and of American troops seeming to kneel in front of his plane, all of which is for the purpose of make-believing back home that Russia is once again America’s equal and that the glory days of empire are soon to return.
All because Trump is scared.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen so often Robert Armstrong came up with an acronym to memorialize it: TACO or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Trump “does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain,” Armstrong said.
Same thing with foreign affairs. According to one analysis, Trump has threatened “severe consequences” 22 times against adversaries, but pulled the trigger just twice. He has chickened out even in the face of America’s weakest foes. For instance, the Taliban conceded absolutely nothing in exchange for American troops leaving the country in 2021.
Liberals and Democrats spend a lot of time thinking about the unseen. Is Trump compromised? Is he in Russian pay? And so on. But we don’t spend enough time on the seen, which is damning enough all by itself.
Trump is the biggest chicken on the planet.
Putin knows it.
If only the Democrats would come around.