Trump in Anchorage: A Humiliation. Trump in DC: A Phony Spectacle.
Donald Trump cares only about imagery. Here is what happens
when a foreign leader understands images far better than Trump does. And what
images reveal about MAGA's bogus commitment to ‘safety’ in DC.
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Two heads of state in Anchorage yesterday. One of them
knows what he is doing. Hint: It is not the taller one, but the one standing
tall. (Photo by Sergey Bobylev/pool/AFP via Getty Images.)
In Anchorage: Puppeteer
and puppet.
Those with experience in US-Russian relations have been quick and near-unanimous in pointing out that
Vladimir Putin got nearly everything he could have wanted¹ from his encounter yesterday with Donald Trump. And no one else got
anything at all.
-“No one else” includes the people and government of
Ukraine; the people and governments of Europe and the broader NATO alliance;
and the people of the United States. (Contrast Trump’s obsequiousness to Putin
with his open hostility in the Oval Office toward Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy
six months ago.)
-It also includes the person who cares about imagery
and theatrics more than anything else. But who let himself be owned and mocked
by a foreign leader, in a way that people around the world recognized more
quickly than he did himself. Of course I am talking about Donald Trump.
Consider the Trump-Putin “press conference” yesterday
afternoon that permitted no questions but involved something even stranger than
that.
-This was a joint presentation on US soil. Indeed, on a
US military base.
-Its two figures were heads of state, of major
countries.
-Because this was in the United States, and because a president of the
United States is presumptively the most powerful figure at any gathering, the
American president should have been unquestionably in charge.
In every previous such event I have seen, the American
president has always taken control. The president steps first to the microphone
and begins the proceedings. He welcomes guests and foreign counterparts. He
frames the issues. He expresses American ambitions, values, and interests.
He acts, in effect, not just as host but also as the
boss. No one doubts who is in charge.
And he does this all in English. Even if he could speak other languages.
(Several presidents have been functional in a variety of languages,
including Herbert Hoover in Chinese.) He does this because he
is in the United States. We are playing by his home
country’s rules. In ways stated and unstated, he signals that he is running
things.
But yesterday, in every conceivable way, Vladimir Putin
was in command. I will mention a surprisingly powerful bit of stage business,
through which Putin established his alpha-leader dominance over the eager
puppy-like supplicant Trump.
At the joint press event yesterday, Putin spoke first.
This may sound like nothing. But it was an enormous power move, which the Trump
team must idiotically have agreed to. To my knowledge, no American president
has ever let it happen before.
It would be like a lawyer speaking first at a trial,
rather than the judge. Or like a graduate speaking first at commencement,
pre-empting the university president. It simply would not occur. Maybe Trump,
in his entertainment-world role, was thinking of Putin as the “warm-up act”? I
can guarantee that the event was not viewed that way in any foreign ministry
around the world.
Then, after he had kicked off the event by taking the mic, Putin went on
to establish even more clearly who was boss. He spoke at great length—more than
twice as long as Trump eventually did. Trump’s eventual response was his usual
ramble, rather than Putin’s prepared and crafted discourse. Putin can speak
English, but he did not deign even to utter a few pleasantries in that
language—while speaking on American soil. (He could have said, but didn’t: “I
am grateful to the president and the people of the United States”²). Instead he plowed straight ahead, all in Russian. He “framed” the
Ukraine issue entirely on Russian terms, starting with its “root causes,” which
boil down to his familiar argument that Russia deserves to control Ukraine.
Putin’s last fillip, inviting Trump to have their next
meeting in Moscow—seemingly unscripted and delivered in English, so everyone
would understand it—clearly caught Trump off guard. With this minor bit of
event-planning—who talks when—Putin took a step ahead of Trump’s team, and a
thousand steps ahead of Trump himself.
I don’t think I’ve used this word previously in
writing. But if I used the vocabulary of a MAGA-style person, I would say that
Trump was cucked.
How could this happen?
When the first President George Bush vomited into the lap of the Japanese prime
minister, during a formal dinner after a long trans-Pacific journey to Tokyo in
1992, it was accidentally humiliating. Naturally it became a symbol of the
elder Bush’s fallibility (versus the young Bill Clinton), and of America’s
struggles relative to Japan, at the time.
But that was pure mishap and misfortune. It was no one’s fault. By
contrast, Trump’s humiliation yesterday, in substantive ways far beyond what I
am mentioning, was due to Putin’s bravado and cunning. And also to the
stupidity of the Trump team,³ and the pathetic
vulnerability to flattery and financial gain of the current president himself.
Here is an image of US resolve that I prefer.
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Barack Obama and Putin, at a meeting in China, during
Obama’s last year in office. Putin, of course, has no officially announced
“last year” in power. (Photo Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, AFP via Getty Images)
