Trump’s
Self-Own Summit with Putin
Even
the puffery-prone President couldn’t alchemize his non-deal with Russia into
Trumpian gold.
August
15, 2025
Source photograph by Andrew
Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty
Nothing says standing up to Russian aggression quite like
welcoming the aggressor on a red carpet and applauding him. On Friday, Donald
Trump did both at the start of his summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. This
triumphant greeting was followed by multiple friendly handshakes, a cordial pat
or two on the arm, and a companionable stride past an enfilade of American F-22
fighter jets at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. When the pair got within
shouting distance of the American press corps, a bit of harsh reality crept in.
“President Putin, will you stop killing civilians?” someone called out. But, on
the twelve-hundred-and-sixty-eighth day since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Putin and
Trump never wavered from the chummy cordiality with which they had greeted each
other for their first meeting in six years. Putin pantomimed not being able to
hear the question and shrugged. In an instant, Trump ushered him away for an
apparently impromptu ride in his Presidential limousine; pictures of the Beast
rolling slowly toward the venue where their formal talks would be held showed
Putin, through the window, grinning broadly.
When they emerged a little more than
three hours later, after a shorter-than-expected session that did not include a
scheduled lunch, the mutual admiration still flowed freely. Both men smiled.
Trump gushed to the media about the “fantastic relationship” he’d always had
with Putin and praised his “very profound” opening statement. Putin was, if
anything, more over the top than Trump, praising the American President’s
personal commitment to “pursuing peace,” as the logo projected on the stage
behind them put it. Putin even played to Trump’s loathing of his predecessor,
Joe Biden, adopting his talking point that the war with Ukraine never would
have happened if Trump, not Biden, had been the American President. After
twenty-five years in power, the former K.G.B. agent has learned well how to
stroke the ego of his fifth U.S. counterpart.
What Putin did not offer, however, was
what Trump has been demanding, without any success, for months: a ceasefire in
Russia’s war with Ukraine. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump
acknowledged in his brief remarks. While he spoke of “great progress” and Putin
gestured at unspecified agreements that had been reached, “we didn’t get
there,” Trump admitted. And that was it. After twelve minutes, and without a
single question, the press conference adjourned, leaving stunned journalists to
interpret the cryptic outcome: Was that really it, after all Trump’s hype?
Sometimes the news is what it seems to
be, meaning, in this case: No deal. The day began with a hellish war in
Ukraine, with air-raid sirens in Kyiv and fierce battles in the east, and that
is how it ended. The only difference is that Putin got one hell of a photo op
out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the
“brotherly” Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his
remarks in Alaska. The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be
its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime
American admirer.
Right around the time that Trump was
on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the
following e-mail:
Attention please, I’m meeting with Putin in Alaska! It’s a
little chilly. THIS MEETING IS VERY HIGH STAKES for the world. The Democrats
would love nothing more than for ME TO FAIL. No one in the
world knows how to make deals like me!
The backdrop for this uniquely
Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course,
anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for
the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six
months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy
that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up
to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr
Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even
a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded.
Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve
days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when
Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of
imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he
would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the
Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at
ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.
In the run-up to the meeting, debates
raged about the right historical parallel to draw between this summit and its
twentieth-century antecedents: Was it to be a replay of Yalta, with two great
powers instead of three settling the fate of absent small nations, and with the
United States once again signing off on Russia’s dominance over its neighbors?
Or perhaps Munich was the better analogy, with Trump in the role of Neville
Chamberlain, ceding a beleaguered ally’s territory as the price of an illusory peace?
For Ukraine and its supporters in the West, the prospect of a sellout by Trump
loomed large.
But history doesn’t repeat so neatly,
and certainly not when Trump is involved. He is a sui-generis American
President, who, at the end of the day, seemed to have orchestrated a self-own
of embarrassing proportions. As ever, Trump’s big mouth offered up the best
reminder of what he wanted in Alaska and what he did not get. On Friday
morning, as Trump flew out of Washington aboard Air Force One, he told
reporters, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be
today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But, after his
long-sought meeting with Putin, as he again boarded Air Force One for the long
flight home, this was the chyron on Fox News that greeted him: “No Ceasefire
After Trump-Putin Summit.”
In the coming days, there will be
endless explanations from Trump and his team as to why he didn’t get more out
of the session. But, even in his post-summit interview with the great White
House amplifier, Sean Hannity, the President struggled to alchemize the
non-deal into Trumpian gold. “On a scale of one to ten,” Hannity asked the
President, how would he grade the session? “The meeting was a ten in the sense
that we got along great,” Trump responded. When Trump started talking, however,
it was hardly about the summit at all, but about the “rigged election” in 2020
and how terrible Biden was and how he and Putin could have got so much done
together if there had been no Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. Soon he was on to
riffs about Iran and the border and his tariffs and how things in the U.S. are
going so great that “Vladimir” told him, “Your country is hot as a pistol.”
(Yeah, right.) On and on Trump went, about beating ISIS and why mail-in voting is terrible, about how big
China is and how powerful America’s nuclear weapons are. Those tough-guy
sanctions he once promised to place on Putin if he didn’t produce a deal
weren’t so much as mentioned.
The more he talked about anything
other than Russia, in fact, the more it was obvious: Even Trump knew he had
bombed. “Now it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done,” he said at
one point. If there’s one unwavering Law of Trump, this is it: Whatever
happens, it is never, ever, his fault. ♦
