The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

Yesterday, military personnel from the United States of America literally rolled out a red carpet for a dictator who invaded a sovereign country and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including the stealing of children. Apparently coached by his team, Trump stood to let Russia’s president Vladimir Putin walk toward him after Putin arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, putting Trump in a dominant position, but he clapped as Putin walked toward him. The two men greeted each other warmly.

This summit between the president of the United States and the president of Russia came together fast, in the midst of the outcry in the U.S. over Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files and the administration’s refusal to release those files.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.

Quickly, though, it became clear that Witkoff’s description of Putin’s offer was wrong, either because Putin had misled him or because he had misunderstood: Witkoff does not speak Russian and, according to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, does not use a notetaker from the U.S. embassy. Nonetheless, on Friday, August 8, Trump announced on social media that he would meet personally with Putin in Alaska, without Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

That the president of the United States offered a meeting to Putin on U.S. soil, ground that once belonged to Russia and that Russian nationalists fantasize about taking back, was itself a win for Putin.

As Jonathan Lemire noted yesterday in The Atlantic, in the week before the meeting, leaders in Ukraine and Europe worried that Trump would agree to Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over Crimea and most of its four eastern oblasts, a demand that Russian operatives made initially in 2016 when they offered to help Trump win the White House—the so-called Mariupol Plan—and then pressure Ukraine to accept the deal.

In the end, that did not happen. The summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin.

That is no small thing, for Russia, which is weak and struggling, managed to break the political isolation it’s lived in since invading Ukraine again in 2022. Further, the choreography of the summit suggested that Russia is equal to the United States. But those important optics were less than Russia wanted.

It appeared that Russia was trying to set the scene for a major powers summit of the past, one in which the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union, were the dominant players, with the USSR dominating the U.S. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up to Alaska in a sweatshirt with the Russian initials for USSR, a sign that Russia intends to absorb Ukraine as well as other former Soviet republics and recreate itself as a dominant world power.

As Lemire notes, Putin indicated he was interested in broadening the conversation to reach beyond Ukraine into economic relations between the two countries, including a discussion of the Arctic, and a nuclear arms agreement. The U.S. seemed to be following suit. It sent a high-ranking delegation that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Witkoff, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Exactly what the White House expected from the summit was unclear. Trump warned that if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire there would be “very severe consequences,” but the White House also had seemed to be walking back any expectations of a deal at the summit, downgrading the meeting to a “listening exercise.”

After Trump and Putin met on the tarmac, Trump ushered the Russian president to the presidential limousine, known as The Beast, giving them time to speak privately despite the apparent efforts of the U.S. delegation to keep that from happening. When the summit began, Rubio and Witkoff joined Trump to make up the U.S. delegation, while Putin, his longtime foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, and Lavrov made up the Russian delegation. The principals emerged after a three-hour meeting with little to say.

At the news conference after their meeting, Putin took the podium first—an odd development, since he was on U.S. soil—and spoke for about eight minutes. Then Trump spoke for three minutes, telling reporters the parties had not agreed to a ceasefire but that he and Putin had made “great progress” in their talks. Both men appeared subdued. They declined to take reporters’ questions.

A Fox News Channel reporter said: “The way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president, then left.” But while Putin got his photo op, he did not get the larger superpower dialogue he evidently wanted. Neither did he get the open support of the United States to end the war on his terms, something he needs as his war against Ukraine drags on.

The two and a half hour working lunch that was scheduled did not take place. Both men left Alaska within an hour.

Speaking with European leaders in a phone call from Air Force One on his way home from the summit, Trump said that Putin rejected the idea of a ceasefire and insisted that Ukraine cede territory to Russia. He also suggested that a coalition of the willing, including the U.S., would be required to provide security guarantees to Ukraine. But within hours, Trump had dropped his demand for a ceasefire and instead echoed Putin’s position that negotiations for a peace agreement should begin without one.

In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity after the meeting, Trump said he would not impose further sanctions on Russia because the meeting with Putin had gone “very well.” “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that now,” Trump told Hannity. “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

Trump also suggested he was backing away from trying to end the war and instead dumping the burden on Ukraine’s president. He told Hannity that “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”

Today Chiara Eisner of NPR reported that officials from the Trump administration left eight pages of information produced by the U.S. State Department in a public printer at the business center of an Alaskan hotel. The pages revealed potentially sensitive information about the August 15 meetings, including the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members and thirteen U.S. and Russian state leaders.

The pages also contained the information that Trump intended to give Putin an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue,” and the menu for the cancelled lunch, which specified that the luncheon was “in honor of his excellency, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”

Sure, why would anybody try to negotiate a settlement to a war?

On the heels of President Donald J. Trump’s Friday meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, Trump will meet with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky Monday afternoon at the White House. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, Trump called Zelensky from Air Force One on the way home from Alaska. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff were also on the hour-long call. The leaders of the European Commission, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Kingdom then joined the call for another half hour.

In the call, Trump embraced Putin’s view of the conflict, telling Zelensky and European leaders that Putin does not want a ceasefire. Trump indicated that he is abandoning his own demand for a ceasefire and adopting Putin’s position that negotiations should take place without one. Zelensky insists on a ceasefire before negotiations. After the call, Trump posted on social media that “it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.” “All” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: it appears to mean Putin, with the possible agreement now of Trump.

Key unanswered questions from Friday’s summit were why it ended so abruptly, with the cancellation of a planned luncheon and more discussions, and why Trump immediately told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about [further sanctions on Russia] now. I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

The abrupt cancellation could mean that U.S. officials sent Putin packing without lunch because he would not agree to a ceasefire. But it seems worth keeping on the table that Trump has recently exhibited both an inability to focus on any topic, and a need to live in a carefully constructed world that ignores reality and assures him he is the best and the brightest. A high-stakes meeting with principals about a very real situation might have been too much for him to manage for a full day.

At the press conference following the summit, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander reported that what struck him was “the looks on the faces of a lot of the American delegation here. Karoline Leavitt…, Steve Witkoff, who came into the room, then left quickly, then came back in. Leavitt appeared to be a bit stressed out, anxious. Their eyes were wide, almost ashen at times.”

At 8:31 this morning, Trump posted one word, “bela,” on his social media account. California governor Gavin Newsom’s social media account, which has been trolling Trump by imitating his boastful, insulting, all-caps posts, wrote: “We broke Donald Trump.”

As of midday Sunday, there appeared to be no mention of the Alaska meeting on the State Department’s website, although it has been updated since Friday to acknowledge Indonesia Independence Day and the Gabonese Republic National Day.

What is clear from the summit, though, is that Trump and Putin badly miscalculated the nature of power in democracies.

It has seemed since 2016 that Putin believed that if he could drive a wedge between the U.S., NATO countries, and other allies, which together have defended a rules-based international order since 1949, he could break that order. Then, absent the system that worked to keep big countries from invading smaller ones, he could take over parts of Ukraine and possibly other countries around Russia. Together, Putin and Trump have gone a long way toward aligning the U.S. government with Putin and other authoritarians. In his first term, Trump talked of leaving NATO, but those in his administration who understood the nature of power prevented him. Now he is operating without those professionals and has shifted the U.S. to a foreign policy that is fraying our relationships with other countries.

But U.S. strength in international relations has always been its relationships, and with the U.S. withdrawing from its traditional democratic alliances, others are strengthening their relationships without the U.S. Today, at a meeting with Zelensky in Brussels, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen stressed that international borders cannot be changed by force. She called for Ukraine to become “a steel porcupine, indigestible for potential invaders.” French president Emmanuel Macron said that Ukraine’s borders must be honored and that “if we show weakness today in front of Russia, we are laying the ground for future conflict.”

These allies are standing together against Putin and, if necessary, against Trump. Von der Leyen will accompany Zelensky to a meeting at the White House on Monday. So will French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb.

National security scholar Tom Nichols noted on social media that it “suggests something went very wrong in Alaska if this many European leaders are coming to Washington on short notice.”

Trump has misunderstood the nature of power in a democracy at home, too. Rather than building domestic coalitions to support the government, he is overseeing the takeover of the government by a radical minority that seems to think the way to build power is for the government to attack its own people.

The administration’s defunding of scientific research, medical care, environmental protection, food safety and security, and emergency management all threaten Americans’ health, safety, and security. Its attacks on history and education, as well as its firing of women and racial and gender minorities, seem designed to drive wedges among Americans. Its incarceration and disappearing of undocumented migrants both creates an “other” for Trump loyalists to hate and provides a warning of what could happen to the regime’s opponents.

Now, under the guise of fighting crime, the administration has quite literally turned guns on the American people.

On June 7, Trump deployed 700 Marines to Los Angeles and federalized 4,100 California National Guard personnel after scattered protests of immigration raids. Administration officials argue that the troops were not engaged in law enforcement but were simply protecting federal agents. California governor Gavin Newsom sued the administration to limit the use of the military in Los Angeles. In the trial, held last week, lawyers for the federal government said troops can protect federal agents wherever they go, effectively asserting that there are no limits to how a president can use troops domestically despite the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act saying the opposite.

That deployment was so deeply unpopular that, as Shawn Hubler of the New York Times reported in July, of the 72 soldiers whose enlistment was set to expire during the deployment, two had already left and 55 said they would not extend their service: a 21% retention rate when the normal retention rate is 60%. One told Hubler: “This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”

But if Trump’s deployments of troops in states can be challenged under the Posse Comitatus Act, that’s a harder call in Washington, D.C., which is overseen by Congress. There, the president controls the National Guard—in contrast to what Trump claimed in 2021—and so did not need additional authority. In addition, the 1973 Home Rule Act that established limited self-government in the city provided that the president could take control of the police department there. Trump is the first to do so.

On Monday, August 11, Trump announced he was placing the Washington, D.C., police department under federal control and deploying National Guard troops there. He asserted that violent crime in the city is “getting worse” and in an executive order claimed that “crime is out of control” in the city.

This is a transparently manufactured excuse to enable the administration to take over a Democratic city with troops they control. In fact, crime in Washington, D.C., has been trending downward for decades and violent crime is now, according to the Department of Justice’s own statistics, at a 30-year low. There is also the sticky little problem of the fact that Trump pardoned about 1,500 of those convicted of crimes for their participation in the riot of January 6, 2021, and that under his direction, the Department of Justice dismissed all pending cases against the remaining January 6 defendants. Many of those defendants attacked police officers.

More generally, the administration seems to be encouraging violence rather than shunning it. As Anna Merlan of Mother Jones reported on Friday, the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security joke on social media about cruelty and torture, suggesting it’s fun to hurt people. They are sanitizing and popularizing state violence. Trump’s pardoning of drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht, sentenced to life in prison, and his welcome to the U.S. of a man convicted of killing three people in Spain suggest the president’s support for “law and order” is coverage for his own political ends.

MAGA’s violent rhetoric is bearing fruit in the shooting of two prominent Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses in early June, killing two. Then, on August 8, a Georgia man who blamed the covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal fired more than 180 shots into the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, killing police officer David Rose, a 33-year-old former Marine.

Yesterday the Republican governors of West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio all said they would send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., to support Trump’s takeover of the city. They will be funded by the federal government—that is, our tax dollars. Journalist Philip Bump illustrated that the true goal of the forces in the city has little to do with actual crime rates by running the numbers. He showed that 43 cities in the states sending troops to Washington, D.C., have higher rates of violent crime than the capital does.

The Trump administration is launching a classic authoritarian project, attempting to take over a country through division and fear. But they badly misunderstand the nature of power. If they succeed, they will control a badly diminished United States of America, one that has fallen to the level of a country like Russia, far from the powerhouse it was when we recognized that the extraordinary strength of our nation always came not from force, but from alliances.

There is one thing Trump’s military deployments against the American people have accomplished though: media mentions of the Epstein files have plummeted.