Trump Between Two Summits

Sometimes when you're a clueless old narcissist the high points are really low points

In “Camelot” there is a famous number in which King Arthur sings, “I wonder what the king is doing tonight.” The lyrics then go on to say that on the eve of his wedding “he’s scared.”

As I write this on the Sunday evening before Trump’s White House meeting with Volodomyr Zelensky and many of Europe’s most important leaders, it seems to me we may have just come upon the only Camelot moment of this administration. Because whether he admits it or not, Trump must be shaking in his cankle-filled oxfords.

The Monday meeting is extraordinary on many levels. Usually when European leaders visit the U.S. president in his home there is a degree of deference and solidarity present even when they may disagree. Also, typically, they were invited. In this case, whatever spin the White House may offer, it appears that the involvement of heads of government from across the EU was engineered not by Trump but by Zelensky.

Further, whatever platitudes may be spouted and whatever flattery of Trump the Europeans may offer up for the cameras and to stroke the elderly narcissist’s ego, the reality is they are showing up because they do not trust Trump and they want to prevent him from attempting to bully Zelensky into accepting the Putin-Trump roadmap to ending the war in Ukraine. That is a road map that largely rewards Russia for its aggression.

The Alaska Summit Was a Fiasco

The optics and the vibe produced by Friday’s Alaska summit between Putin and Trump did not help. (I wrote about it for The Daily Beast if you want a more extensive run down of my reactions to the diplomatic debacle.)

The entire event was essentially a reward to Putin, granting him a red carpet welcome to the US in spite of his war crimes and serial violations of international law. Further, Trump’s giddy demeanor in welcoming Putin was that of an excited child seeing his long absent father for the first time in years. In addition, the meeting itself was not transparent. There were no notes. There was no joint communique. As always in meetings between Trump and Putin, one can only imagine what deals were cut in private.

Hints were, however, provided. Putin spoke first at the press event following the meeting. He spoke longer. He was allowed to set the tone. Further, he laid it on thick with lines that stroked Trump’s ego and supported his dubious narratives about the past history of their relationship. Then, Trump spoke of the potential for both sides to move beyond Ukraine and on to new forms of economic cooperation. Finally, most saliently, after both leaders left Alaska, Trump announced that he was dropping the requirement for a ceasefire to precede a peace deal and buying into Putin’s preferred approach of going straight to the peace deal, a complex process that would allow Russia to pound Ukraine for many more months or even years and to do so while negotiations were taking place.

Trump went to the meeting with no Russia experts. He has no real national security advisor. He was flanked by his negotiator, Steve Witkoff, a man with no foreign policy experience who already indicated after previous meetings with Putin that he was a soft touch in the presence of the wily former KGB officer, and by Marco Rubio, once a Russia hawk, who has literally given up every principle he may once have held dear in order to become Trump’s Secretary of State. On today’s Sunday morning shows, these two showed how little coordination there was between them, each offering different views of what was achieved in Alaska.

Rubio also tipped the Trump Administration’s hand when he began to argue that Ukraine really didn’t matter much to average Americans. This is, per polling, not true. It is also not true that it doesn’t matter to the U.S. Quite the contrary, this war and how it is resolved will have major implications for vital U.S. national security interests and those of our allies. But, li'l Marco said it because Trump has already repeatedly indicated that if this process becomes too drawn out or complicated, he is ready to walk away from it.

Frankly, my guess is that he wishes he could do that now, before tomorrow’s meeting.

That is because he will not be able to go all mafia don on Zelensky as he did during his first term when he withheld aid to try to coerce him into digging up nonexistent dirt on Joe Biden and as he later also did in the infamous Oval Office confrontation the two had earlier this year. Zelensky has smartly brought along very powerful friends who will deliver a message seldom heard within NATO over the past almost eight decades.

America’s Incredible Shrinking Influence in NATO

That shocking message is that the U.S. under Trump is no longer the first among equals. This is a perspective that Trump actively helped come to pass. First, he spoke of leaving NATO and Europeans realized they would have to play a bigger role going forward in their common defense. They also realized the U.S. was not a reliable ally. Then, Trump indicated his sympathies for the Russian point of view, using Russian talking points, all big lies, to describe the origins of the conflict and the views of the people on the ground. Then, Trump cut back dramatically on U.S. aid to Ukraine including, for a time, stopping the vital flow of U.S. intelligence to Kyiv. Finally, Trump reached out to Putin and held this love-fest gone awry in Alaska.

Prior to the Alaska summit, Zelensky and the EU leadership recognized they needed a united front to send a message to Trump that he could not cut any deals without their approval. They sent the message beforehand and then essentially dictated the process that is now underway via which their views will be made clear to Trump.

It is really an extraordinary event on many levels. But for Trump, the hidden message may be the most difficult to swallow. Rather than a show of NATO solidarity, this is a meeting that shouts the unmistakable message that our European allies do not trust Trump.

While Witkoff said Sunday that Putin had agreed to “Article 5-like” security guarantees for Ukraine, actually achieving them seems far-fetched given that one of Putin’s primary reasons for invading Ukraine was to oppose its entry into NATO. (Article 5 is the NATO Treaty provision that says that if one member is attacked the others will treat it as an attack on them.) In addition to security guarantees, the issue of “land swaps”—essentially giving the Russian aggressors Ukrainian territory that they have illegally seized, also seems like one on which it will be very difficult to reconcile Russian demands, Ukrainian rights, NATO interests and international law. (Never mind right and wrong.)

Every leader meeting with Trump on Monday knows these issues better than does Trump and his expert-free administration team. (As was the case with Putin.) They not only will not be cowed, they will not be conned which really deprives Trump of his go-to move.

These issues are all too serious to Ukraine and the Europeans to be left to the whims of an ignorant 79-year-old narcissist who seeks peace mainly because he wants to win a big prize and finally get the respect that has (rightly) eluded him all his life. Further, he wants to make Putin happy…and conversely, he definitely does not want to make Putin mad.

So he finds himself in a situation in which his bullshit and bullying won’t work. If he becomes Putin’s advocate in the session, he will be called out for it. Indeed, that’s another dimension of a big multilateral meeting like the one that will take place Monday. Trump can’t control the narrative. There will be a big number of folks who will take notes, who will speak the truth about the meeting, who will make sure Trump can’t spin this story to suit his political needs.

If he ditches Putin’s side at the meeting of course that raises other big problems for him. It is not in his nature. He has been actively loyal to Putin for a decade. His whole hope when saying he could solve this conflict in a day was that he could tell Zelensky he’d pull the plug on aid if he didn’t give up the land and prerogatives Putin sought to claim. But that hasn’t worked out because neither Putin nor Zelensky nor the Europeans are as shallow as Trump. They realize the stakes and the history in ways Trump never will.

Changing the Subject Before the Shit Hits the Fan

So, Trump is going to be forced to make hard choices tomorrow or in the weeks or months that follow and frankly, I don’t think he is ready for that. I think he’d rather blame both sides, with a little extra blame for Ukraine and our NATO allies, and then say, “Sorry, we have bigger fish to fry. Let me get back to invading America’s cities and advancing my authoritarian dream of an America that looks just like Vladimir Putin always imagined it.”

He may not do that tomorrow. He may not take it to the next level and immediately begin distancing himself further from NATO and the EU as he has long wanted to do. More likely, he will claim credit for the meeting taking place and try to frame what comes out of it as a peace process for which he is responsible. In the language of Wall Street he wants to be able to own the upside and hedge against the very real possibility that peace never comes or doesn’t last. He’ll welcome announcements of process and further meetings because that way he can portray himself as a success today and hopefully change the subject before the shit hits the fan.

But of course, given the position into which he has put Ukraine and Europe, it is going to be very hard for him to hide his role or to dictate how this process goes. And no one else involved—not Ukraine, not the EU and not Putin feel that Trump has, as he might say, “the cards” to determine what happens in the near, medium or long term on these issues.

With each day he reveals his increasing impotence.

In fact, one ancillary message of the Alaska event that Trump inadvertently delivered is that he has no role to play in this in the medium-to-long term. He looked old, feeble and not up to the task of leading any international process. Watching him, it was crystal clear that his days are numbered as president. He is a lame duck at home and abroad. And everyone (except maybe most American political leaders) realizes it.

A final word: Huge credit to Zelensky for once again rising to an almost impossible challenge and for orchestrating this diplomatic defense against a superpower that is nearly as impressive as the defense he has helped lead against the nuclear superpower that invaded his country. It is very impressive and not something anyone would have imagined him capable of four years ago. He is showing great courage. Further, he is playing chess while the ever tactical and strategically-impaired Putin is left playing checkers. As for Trump, he is just getting played.