James Fallows is a veteran journalist who has been writing about foreign affairs for decades. He notes the symbolism and messaging embedded in the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska.
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.