Susan Wright on the Right
There was speculation among some as to if President Trump’s upcoming summit with his man-crush, Russian President Vladimir Putin would include any alone time for the pair.
There was also a lot of warning that this would be disastrous and highly recommended against.
So, in true Trumpian fashion, it appears that that’s exactly what the president is planning.
According to a person familiar with the plans surrounding the July 16 summit between the two leaders in Helsinki, Finland, President Trump intends to meet one-on-one with the former KGB agent, before he allows any aides access to the meeting.
It is bad.
Trump has shown an affinity for meeting individually with his counterparts before opening the room to fuller delegations. During his historic summit with Kim Jong Un last month, Trump met for about an hour with just the North Korean dictator, joined only by their translators. Emerging from the face-to-face, Trump told reporters the discussion was “very, very good.”
That’s right. And he came home from that meeting declaring a murderous tyrant a “good guy,” and said the rogue regime was no longer a nuclear threat.
What we’ve found since that time is that they never stopped being a nuclear threat and are continuously building up their nuclear arsenal.
He had said before the Singapore talks that he wanted to take the measure of Kim personally and gauge their chemistry. In the case of Putin, Trump has already assessed their interpersonal ties up close, but wants more time to develop the leader-to-leader relationship, according to the person familiar with the summit’s planning.
Trump will be going into a one-on-one meeting with a man whose government engages in espionage on a regular basis, having interfered in our nation’s 2016 election and having used social media to stir up angst among our citizens.
This is a ruthless leader who has journalists and dissidents murdered.
But Trump, several steps shy of being as adroit as the Keystone Cops, wants to meet with him without aides or policy experts.
As a former top KGB agent, Vladimir Putin’s whole shtick was reading people, getting inside their heads, and then manipulating them.
How much time do you think it would take for him to pull everything out of that vat of tapioca jiggling about between Donald Trump’s ears?
At Trump and Putin’s first meeting, on the margins of the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, a year ago, the only aide to accompany the President was then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, along with a US translator. The session went so long that first lady Melania Trump was sent in to try to cut it off.
In a second conversation during dinner at the same summit, Trump was without a translator who spoke Russian, so instead relied on Putin’s. The men spoke for about an hour without any other aides present, officials said later. The White House downplayed the significance of the encounter, but experts expressed concern there was no official US record of the talk.
And that’s the problem. When there are no aides or policy experts on hand, there is no record of what is discussed, and this is the well-being of our nation, not some backroom mob deal to get cheap concrete for one of Trump’s buildings.
Aides will eventually join the meeting during the rest of the summit, in order to guide talks on a variety of issues, including the 2016 election interference that Putin, Trump, and new national security adviser John Bolton say never happened (because Putin’s word holds more weight than that of the entire U.S. intelligence community, apparently).
“The goal of this meeting really is for the two leaders to have a chance to sit down, not in the context of some larger multilateral meeting, but just the two of them, to go over what is on their mind about a whole range of issues,” national security adviser John Bolton said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Trump addressed the issue of the upcoming summit on Friday, while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.
“I’ll talk to him about everything,” Trump said. “We’re going to talk about Ukraine, we’re going to be talking about Syria, we’ll be talking about elections. And we don’t want anybody tampering with elections. We’ll be talking about world events. We’ll be talking about peace. Maybe we talk about saving billions of dollars on weapons, and maybe we don’t.”
That, according to aides, was a reference to Trump’s long-standing interest in addressing what he perceives as a potential nuclear arms race between the US and Russia. Earlier this year, Putin boasted about the strength of Russia’s arsenal, to which Trump took umbrage. He raised that issue in his last phone call with Putin, which occurred in March, and hopes to raise it again during the July 16 talks. He has told advisers that any face-to-face meeting with the leader of a nuclear power — including Putin and Kim — is a worthwhile endeavor.
And of course, Trump wants it to be seen as a major event, with much pomp and diplomatic weight.
And cameras. Lots and lots of cameras.
We’re still 2 weeks away from the summit, so there’s hope that somebody can talk him out of meeting privately with Putin before they go through this sham. Given his unusual desire to appeal to Putin, even in the midst of an ongoing special counsel probe involving potential connections between the Kremlin and himself, I’m going to say the private meeting happens.
And he’ll deserve all the increased scrutiny that follows.
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