Opinion

Trump has humiliated America

Robert Service
Sat, August 16, 2025 

THE TELEGRAPH, UK

Putin

The Alaska summit has finished. Donald Trump afterwards described it as a “ten out of ten” experience, declaring that “great progress” was made towards peace in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin appreciated the camaraderie and Trump responded with hand pats and tender glances.

The American allowed the Russian to dominate a press conference, which prevented the press from asking any questions. Putin, holding his sheaf of prepared notes, expertly performed a political somersault. During the current war he and his administration have scoffed at any idea that Russia is fighting Ukraine.

For Putin, Ukrainian president Zelensky is merely an American puppet and America alone bears the responsibility for prolonging the current war.

In Anchorage, though, Putin instead highlighted the military aid that the US transferred to Russia in the Second World War across the Bering Strait.

It was a ploy to deflect attention from the Ukrainian question. In the week before the summit, president Trump had huffed and puffed like a strongman.

He growled that if Putin rejected steps to a ceasefire, he would introduce ‘severe’ secondary economic sanctions that would punish any country that bought Russian oil and gas.

If Trump had stuck to this standpoint in Alaska, Russia’s economy would now be succumbing to crippling pressure of sanctions against countries which buy their oil and gas from Moscow. Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov would have to tell Putin that the “special military operation” was no longer affordable.

Currently the Russian cost of living index is high, but Russians have found it bearable. Any further heightening would spell danger for the Kremlin. But Donald suddenly lost his militancy when he met Vladimir at the airport and invited him to join him on the backseat of “The Beast” – the armoured Cadillac that usually carries only the US president.

In Anchorage, Trump appeared to fall, not for the first time, for Putin’s charm. Putin learned his skills at a KGB training school where one of the textbooks – believe it or not – was Dale Carnegie’s “How to Make Friends and Influence People”.

At the press conference, as his heralded super-deal to end the Ukraine war tumbled to the floor, Trump’s morale appeared punctured. This is no surprise after weeks when he insisted that a speedy agreement on land swaps was available for a permanent peace.

In a Fox TV interview immediately after the summit, however, he suggested that it is no longer his but rather Zelensky’s task to negotiate such a deal.

He did not say how Zelensky might do this without capitulating to Russian terms and ending his own presidency because Ukraine, for all its defects, is a democracy, and Ukrainians agree that national surrender should not be an option for their rulers. Putin’s invasion has reinforced, not undermined, this resolve.

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As Zelensky has pointed out, Ukraine’s sovereignty and its protection are a vital interest for all of Europe. Some commentators in the West still blame the United States for over-expanding Nato membership. They fail to understand that the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe banged on Washington’s door throughout the 1990s to allow them to join the alliance.

They rightly assumed, from their experience at the USSR’s hands, that Russia had not necessarily lost its imperial instincts. They needed to secure their defences in case there was a resurgence of Russian power. When the price of oil rose on world markets in the early 2000s, Russia’s ambitions grew with its financial revenues.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are thankful that they made it into Nato before Putin could do to them what he has done to Ukraine. But as was shown in 2007 by the cyber-attack on Estonia’s entire IT network, Russia continues to regard Baltic states as potential prey.

Were Ukraine to drown in the current wave of Russian offensives it would not be long before moves were made against other countries along the Baltic littoral.

Donald Trump has handed over to Zelensky the responsibility for dealing with Moscow. Earlier this year he and vice-president JD Vance were personally offensive to Zelensky at a live TV session in the White House when war leader Zelensky was even criticised for wearing military fatigues rather than a suit and tie. American supplies of war-fighting equipment have always been crucial in enabling the Ukrainians to defend themselves.

But Trump has sometimes turned off the tap, and it now has to be kept open by the European powers which buy arms from the United States for transfer to Ukraine. The concern must be that the White House might decide to suspend even this arrangement.

What, though, does Trump now expect of Zelensky? Will he demand agreement to so-called land swaps as the price for any kind of support from America? And will the American president continue circling in orbit around Planet Putin?

The answer will not depend solely on Trump’s preferences. As the first editions of Russian press told the summit story on Saturday morning, the Alaska talks were a victory for Putin.

Without promising a ceasefire, Russia was beckoned back into the comity of the world’s great powers. Until now Trump has received an easy ride from the conservative end of the American media spectrum. But Americans are patriots first and foremost – how long will they put up with the master of the deal, who has the pack of cards in his grasp, dealing with them so ineptly?

Public opinion in the United States does not favour presidential losers – one of Trump’s favourite words of abuse – when they permit the public humiliation of American power and prestige

Opinion

Trump baked in Alaska: He grovels — worse yet, it’s bad TV

Andrew O'Hehir
Sun, August 17, 2025



President Donald Trump greets Russian President Vladimir Putin as he arrives at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, Aug. 15, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images


Donald Trump’s supposed strength lies in showmanship and stagecraft, or at least in shamelessly whoring for attention, which is not exactly the same thing. The fact that “we” — meaning the entire ecosystem of media and public opinion, including you and me — keep giving him attention, like a bunch of aging addicts chasing an unachievable high, says more about us than about him.

But while Trump’s second administration is undeniably nastier and more destructive than his first, it’s not entirely clear who’s driving the bus to dystopia. Because it ain’t him. Trump has always seemed more like a sump pump of received wisdom and reprocessed opinions than an actual human adult, but even by those standards he now appears enormously diminished. His so-called summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday was an abject failure (for everyone but Putin), making clear that the president’s performance skills have degraded nearly as much as his already-damaged cognitive abilities.

It seems almost beside the point to report that Trump and Putin failed to achieve a breakthrough in resolving the Ukraine conflict, and that Trump appears to have pivoted back to Putin’s view of the war, at least for the moment, after a brief personal flirtation with the orthodox pro-Ukraine position of other Western leaders. Did anyone genuinely expect a different outcome? It’s not entirely a rhetorical question; a lot of people at least pretended to.

The endlessly disproven notion that Trump is a master negotiator, uniquely skilled at making “deals” (whatever that even means), is like a fading folk belief or sectarian doctrine. For MAGA believers, it’s a received truth that requires no evidence and can never be contradicted by facts. For mainstream journalists, it’s an aspect of the Trump legend that must be treated with reverence, and demands the perpetual suspension of disbelief. Even after all these years, they remain mystified and mesmerized by the Trump phenomenon, and follow him around like a flock of children hoping to learn Harry Houdini’s secrets: Maybe this time, the magic will be real!

It wasn’t real this time either, and the consensus view that Trump was thoroughly pantsed by the Russian leader is correct, or close enough. Putin was welcomed back to the Western world with a literal red carpet, while giving nothing away and making no concessions. Amid the baffled and disgruntled commentary coming in from all directions, I was especially struck by New York Times fashion reporter Vanessa Friedman, who goes straight to the heart of the matter in far more economical fashion than most of her peers. The point of the whole show, she writes, was the photo op depicting Putin and Trump

in complementary dark suits — single-breasted, two-button — matching white shirts and coordinating ties … giving the impression of kindred spirits: just two statesmen meeting on the semi-neutral ground of an airport tarmac to go talk cease-fire, their respective planes looming in the background.

Both men, Friedman continues, understand “the power of the image” and “have made themselves into caricatures through costume and scenography, the better to capture the popular imagination.” What she does not say, perhaps to avoid throwing shade on her colleagues from the supposed grown-up desks, is that Trump’s image-making fell flat during this particular spectacle, and the whole world was watching.

That helps explain the scathing reviews from the Trump-orbiting press corps: Not only was there no peace deal in Ukraine — which, not to be tiresome, was something Trump promised he would accomplish in one day — but, worse yet, our guy put on a bad show. Armies of commentators, reporters and photographers were hauled off to the 49th state expecting a vintage Trump performance, of the sort that has lubricated their industry for an entire decade.

What they got instead was inconclusive meeting that produced no agreement of any sort, followed by “an awkward press appearance” captured by the Washington Post with a textbook people-are-saying deflection:

Reporters also noted that Trump spoke for just a few minutes before stepping off stage and described him as appearing unhappy, tired or bored during the joint appearance.

I’m sorry, what? Which reporters said such disgraceful things about our president, and why aren’t you naming them or quoting them? Was it by any chance the reporters who wrote this article? Was it someone else? Did they swear you to secrecy?

I’ll tell you who was unhappy, tired and bored: All the mainstream journalists who felt personally insulted after traveling all that way for a depressing pseudo-event with crap ratings. This was a new experience in their long-running relationship with Donald J. Trump; the media transition to covering a lame-duck presidency has begun. (Sure, I know: He might try to run again or stay in office or whatever, but it sure doesn’t feel that way right now.)

By Saturday afternoon, we witnessed the arrival of sober and long-winded policy analysis in numerous forums, most of it making painfully obvious points: Trump had reversed himself shamefully, apparently in exchange for empty flattery from the Russian leader — full points for whoever told Putin to bring up the 2020 election! — and had done less than nothing to advance the prospects of peace in Ukraine.

But the tone of disappointment and personal insult had already been established, and if nothing else it fueled a lot of enjoyably outraged prose. For Peter Baker of the Times, normally something of a Trump neutral, “the Anchorage meeting with Mr. Putin now stands out as a reversal of historic proportions,” even by the standards of Trump’s “erratic presidency.”

For Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic, “It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior.” Much of what is admirable in Applebaum’s work, and also what is dubious, is captured in that one sentence: She is a fine writer, a clear thinker, a forceful exponent of old-school internationalism and something of a neo-Cold Warrior.

Speaking of Cold War throwbacks, Max Boot’s column in the Washington Post was uncharacteristically listless, as if he not only wished that the summit hadn’t happened but also that he didn’t have to write about it. (All these years of fruitless warmongering have worn Boot out, I fear.) Putin was the “clear winner,” he writes, and Trump “looked positively giddy” as he escorted Putin into the presidential limo known as “The Beast.”

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Beneath this outpouring of anti-Trump snark lies a veiled suggestion calculated to inflame the MAGA faithful: Trump wasn’t just outmaneuvered by Putin but literally unmanned, and there’s something feminine or masochistic or sexually submissive in the “happy puppy” relationship between the wannabe dictator and the genuine article. Whether that’s a sophomoric insult or acute psychological insight is, I suppose, a matter of interpretation, but it’s been an element of liberal Trump-Putin discourse since the 2016 campaign.

David Smith of the Guardian frames his otherwise conventional analysis by taking that premise to a hyperbolic and faintly homophobic extreme: “That was the moment he knew it was true love,” he writes, awkwardly framing Trump’s reaction to Putin’s endorsement of his alternate-history claim that the Ukraine invasion would never have happened with Trump in the White House. Smith then contends that the Alaska summit was actually worse than “Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler in Munich 1938,” or the Churchill/FDR/Stalin Yalta Conference that carved up Europe in 1945, without even trying to explain or defend that outlandish proposition. Because these guys seem so gay? (I imagine that’s not it.)

What actually happened, and didn’t happen, between these so-called world leaders on Friday in Alaska wasn’t especially surprising, or all that difficult to understand. Donald Trump ran headlong into reality, in the form of an uncharismatic but implacable opponent who holds most of the cards, to use Trump’s favorite metaphor, and is in position to grind out a slow and painful endgame to this war, largely on his own terms. But he also ran into something else, which could be the outer limits of his diminishing ability to shape the narrative so it’s always about him.

No one expected Trump to grow a spine or display moral principles or “become presidential.” His low-key quisling turn was entirely in character, and not nearly enough to explain the media’s collective sense of betrayal. What the fading infotainment priesthood wanted, or rather needed, was vintage Trump theater: outrageous bluster, false claims, fatuous rhetoric, unfulfillable or alarming promises (with something or other about the future of Ukraine thrown in). Instead, they watched their main character deflate before their eyes, like a sad-clown balloon at the end of a long day at the theme park. Trump committed the only unforgivable sin of this era: He was small and boring.

The post Trump baked in Alaska: He grovels — worse yet, it’s bad TV appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump Melts Down Over Negative Coverage of Putin Summit Flop

Emell Derra Adolphus
Sun, August 17, 2025 

Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

President Donald Trump launched into a Sunday morning rage on the heels of negative media coverage around his flop summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Media outlets reported that Trump largely came away empty-handed from his historic Putin meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, save for a puzzling Putin lecture about eliminating “all the primary root causes” of his full-scale assault on Ukraine.

President Donald Trump walked away from his historic summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin with no deal in place for peace in Ukraine. / SERGEY BOBYLEV / POOL/AFP via Getty Images

In a post-meeting debrief, Trump said “there’s no deal until there’s a deal.” He added, “I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate, and I’ll, of course, call up President Zelensky and tell them about today’s meeting. It’s ultimately up to them.”

Yet judging from the Truth Social posts he fired off first thing on Sunday, Trump appears to be feeling the pressure of having made no deal with Putin after previously positioning himself as America’s dealmaker-in-chief.

“It’s incredible how the Fake News violently distorts the TRUTH when it comes to me,” Trump posted. “There is NOTHING I can say or do that would lead them to write or report honestly about me. I had a great meeting in Alaska on Biden’s stupid War, a war that should have never happened!!!”

Doubling down on rage for breakfast, Trump added, “If I got Russia to give up Moscow as part of the Deal, the Fake News, and their PARTNER, the Radical Left Democrats, would say I made a terrible mistake and a very bad deal. That’s why they are the FAKE NEWS!”

Ahead of his Monday meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a gaggle of European reinforcements, Trump also made sure to add a plug for his long-suffering bid to be an awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote, “Also, they should talk about the 6 WARS, etc., I JUST STOPPED!!! MAGA”

Politico reported that Trump has stooped to cold-calling Norwegian diplomats to pester them about the prize, with the summit reportedly playing a large part in his campaign to put himself up for the award.

Yet even before it flopped, MAGA pundits came out and said that Trump deserves the prize regardless.