Add longtime National Review columnist Jim Geraghty to the list of observers who watched Donald Trump boast about how well his negotiations with Vladimir Putin are going only to see the Russian strongman hours later prove otherwise with his actions.
On Tuesday, the U.S. president took to his truth Social platform to announce to the world, "... we agreed to an immediate Ceasefire on all Energy and Infrastructure, with an understanding that we will be working quickly to have a Complete Ceasefire and, ultimately, an END to this very horrible War between Russia and Ukraine.”
Not long after Putin's invading military launched an assault on power grid in Slovyansk combined with a fresh and massive air attack on civilian targets in Ukraine that resulted in crippling a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Sumy.
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That led the conservative columnist to dryly observe, "America’s negotiations with a former KGB officer are being handled by a president who is extremely naïve and gullible."
According to the columnist, he would "love" to write that the president has "worked out some ingenious win-win arrangement that ended the war and preserved an independent and free Ukraine," but that does not appear to be the case.
"Putin played Trump like a fiddle, offering him platitudes and the mirage of a small concession, which Trump rushed to announce to the world as a great diplomatic breakthrough. Now Trump looks like a sucker, a man easily fooled by promises," he wrote before arguing, "...it is long past time to stop getting mad at those of us who have the audacity to point out that the strategy of offering Putin ever-higher piles of carrots and never threatening with any sticks isn’t working."
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