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

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.