Soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Alaska on Friday last week to discuss how he might end his invasion of Ukraine, US President Donald Trump ushered the Russian leader into the back of his armored limousine, known as “the Beast.”
The pair rode alone together for about 10 minutes before reaching a conference room where their formal meeting was to take place. Putin speaks passable English, and there were no interpreters in the vehicle. No other aides or officials were with them either, and thus far there is no public record of what they chatted about.
That is generally how Trump prefers to court Putin. In previous meetings, including a particularly embarrassing confab in Helsinki in 2018, he has met Putin with only interpreters present or has simply confiscated notes of their discussions.
Illustration: Mountain People
There once was a pre-Trump world in which no president would have routinely sabotaged political transparency, good government, sound national security, federal recordkeeping rules and the history books by conducting the nation’s business in the dark. Those days are past, of course, but the mystery remains of what exactly Trump petitions Putin for whenever they huddle in the shadows.
The bright interpretation of all of this is that Trump is a deft dealmaker who relies on one-to-one glad-handing and cajoling to secure stellar outcomes for the US and its allies.
Apart from the fact that Trump’s track record as a businessman and president has been littered with deals gone awry, there is little to suggest that what Trump walked away with in Alaska was stellar. He went into the meeting with Putin claiming he would seek a ceasefire before negotiations to end the war could begin and left saying Ukraine and Russia should seek a peace deal.
In that configuration, Ukraine would possibly be left having to cede important swaths of its territory to Russia to assuage Trump and Putin. That is not a peace plan. It is a capitulation. It replicates the error the West made in allowing Putin to invade and annex Crimea in 2014 in the belief that it would forestall further predations and a larger conflagration.
Putin has reportedly offered a written promise not to attack Ukraine again, but that guarantee is as reliable as the person making it.
The peril in all of this, matched with Trump’s about-face in Alaska, is why several European leaders joined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for his meeting on Monday with Trump at the White House. The Europeans, well-versed in Putin’s broader designs on the Baltic States and the continuing threat he poses, understand that strong-arming Zelenskiy into concessions might simply postpone further conflicts, not end them.
That leaves consideration of the unsettling reasons for Trump’s private time with Putin in the Beast and other venues. That means letting go of considerations about “strategy,” “doctrines” or broad “policy goals” when trying to divine what motivates Trump as he unpredictably cartwheels from position to position and from statement to statement.
The most useful lenses for understanding why Trump does what he does are self-aggrandizement and self-preservation. He is almost invariably motivated by at least one of those things — and often both. All of the energy that goes into speculating about his grand designs or philosophy is a distraction. He is in it for himself.
You might conclude that his desire to use tax dollars to buy a federal stake in Intel Corp signals that Trump is an aficionado of China-like state capitalism. You might think the same of his demands that Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc kick back 15 percent of their chip sales to China to Washington. Sure, you could describe his desire to create a sovereign wealth fund bankrolled by foreign investment and personally managed by him as part of that plan, too.
Remember that the hallmark of Trump’s second presidential term is how much he revels in finding and then exploiting every avenue of unilateral authority his office allows — economically, diplomatically and culturally. He is Donald Rex, emperor of all he surveys.
That is how the US ended up with a crazy quilt of tariffs that have had little to do with economic vibrancy, a manufacturing renaissance and rational trading regimes. They are there because Trump feels aggrieved and reality TV presentations in the Rose Garden allow him to unfurl a list of villains he can penalize. He enjoys it.
Are scientists and other researchers coming up with solutions that do not correspond to a late 19th century understanding of public health? Defund them, because you can. Are universities too independent and hotbeds of lefty sentiment and intolerance? Defund them, because you can.
Are cryptocurrencies no longer a “scam,” as you once said they were, now that you are in a position to mint billions for you and your family by supporting them as president? Of course they are not, so throw the weight of the federal government behind them, because you can.
Are immigrants flooding the country and threatening public safety and the economy rather than filling jobs businesses need to fill? Round them up like sheep, strip them of their civil rights and deport them, because you can. Are cities swamped in crime at a scale that only you can see? Send in the US National Guard, the FBI and unidentifiable agents in masks.
Much of this also plays to Trump’s political base, of course, and embraces real public grievances that Democrats have not adequately addressed. However, beyond haphazardly plucking at raw emotional nerves and dark, divisive sentiments, it does not constitute a worldview beyond paranoia.
Trump’s attempted cures have wildly overshot the dimensions of the problems fixating him. The common thread is that his responses play to his own sense of what it means to rule and live large (which also happens to be a reason he fawns over Putin, another guy who gets to live large).
Is Putin a great leader who should be coddled and appeased because you aspire to be just like him? Or does convening with him diplomatically offer an opportunity to talk about business deals in Russia like the one you were pursuing while running for president in 2016? Or whatever it was that you might have been kicking around in the back of the Beast? Fine, you can do that, too.
There is not lofty political and economic theory or three-dimensional chess at work here. It is neither liberal nor conservative. It is medieval and it is monarchical. It is self-aggrandizing. Trump is seen and he is content, whatever happens to Ukraine, Europe and the US’ national security along the way.
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Taiwan has lost Trump. Or so a former State Department official and lobbyist would have us believe. Writing for online outlet Domino Theory in an article titled “How Taiwan lost Trump,” Christian Whiton provides a litany of reasons that the William Lai (賴清德) and Donald Trump administrations have supposedly fallen out — and it’s all Lai’s fault. Although many of Whiton’s claims are misleading or ill-informed, the article is helpfully, if unintentionally, revealing of a key aspect of the MAGA worldview. Whiton complains of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s “inability to understand and relate to the New Right in America.” Many
US lobbyist Christian Whiton has published an update to his article, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” discussed on the editorial page on Sunday. His new article, titled “What Taiwan Should Do” refers to the three articles published in the Taipei Times, saying that none had offered a solution to the problems he identified. That is fair. The articles pushed back on points Whiton made that were felt partisan, misdirected or uninformed; in this response, he offers solutions of his own. While many are on point and he would find no disagreement here, the nuances of the political and historical complexities in
Taiwan is to hold a referendum on Saturday next week to decide whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant, which was shut down in May after 40 years of service, should restart operations for as long as another 20 years. The referendum was proposed by the opposition Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and passed in the legislature with support from the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Its question reads: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should continue operations upon approval by the competent authority and confirmation that there are no safety concerns?” Supporters of the proposal argue that nuclear power
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month raised its travel alert for China’s Guangdong Province to Level 2 “Alert,” advising travelers to take enhanced precautions amid a chikungunya outbreak in the region. More than 8,000 cases have been reported in the province since June. Chikungunya is caused by the chikungunya virus and transmitted to humans through bites from infected mosquitoes, most commonly Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. These species thrive in warm, humid climates and are also major vectors for dengue, Zika and yellow fever. The disease is characterized by high fever and severe, often incapacitating joint pain.
RSS