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.
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.)
This is a short post, about two items of stage business that represent far more consequential trends.
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 running things.
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.
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 things off 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 finally 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. He did not pause for consecutive interpretation, or even wait for simultaneous interpreters to realize what he was doing and begin providing an English version for listeners scrambling to find headsets.
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 and inexperience 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.
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)
In Washington DC: Spectacle over safety.
We all know that Trump has deployed ICE, the National Guard, the FBI, and every agency he can think of to deal with the runaway crime “emergency” in Washington DC.
The Washington Post has now very usefully clarified what an entirely phony security-theater exercise this is.
Here is the Post’s excellent map of which entities are doing what, in which parts of the city:
If you know DC, what do you notice on this map image? A few things: