The Situation: Trump’s Folly

The Situation on Monday contemplated the crime wave that really is taking place in Washington, D.C.—the one being led by the president who just took over my city’s local law enforcement and sent in the national guard.

Tomorrow—apparently not content with mere domestic corruption crimes—our president will meet in Alaska with the greatest criminal of our time: Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

The choice of Alaska as the venue for this meeting oozes irony. On Sunday, I found myself walking in the as-yet-unoccupied Eastern Market area of Washington with three Ukrainians. We had just had lunch and were heading toward a flea market, talking—of course—about the coming Alaska summit. I realized as we were walking that we were, quite unintentionally, passing through a little park called Seward Square:

I pointed out to one of my companions that the street we were walking on is literally named for William Seward, the man who—as secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson—acquired Alaska from, of all places, the Russian empire. That purchase, as you may recall, was derisively called at the time “Seward’s Folly.” So here I was, in other words, walking with Ukrainians across a square named for the man who had bought Alaska from Russia, the very place to which our president is now going to betray their country—and ours—to the Russians. 

I will be observing the occasion of the Alaska summit by painting a giant Ukrainian flag in front of the Russian embassy in Washington in sidewalk chalk. (I will be livestreaming the effort on my Substack if you care to join me.) I’m honestly not sure how else to express my incandescent rage at this latest turn in Trump administration policy toward Russia and Ukraine. 

Only a week ago, American policy on the war had reached what I considered a reasonably constructive position—constructive for Trump, anyway—towards the matter. Trump had stopped blaming Ukraine for the war. He had turned on Putin and seemed to understand that he had been punked over and over again by the Russian strongman. Though he was not seeking more funds to supply weapons to Ukraine, he was no longer standing in the way of European purchases of American weapons for that purpose. And he was talking about imposing punishing secondary tariffs on countries that keep buying Russian oil. There was even a deadline for that action. If Russia didn’t agree to a ceasefire within 50 days, or two weeks, or … never mind.

Because Russia didn’t agree to a ceasefire and instead kept right on pounding Ukrainian civilian targets.

And of course, it came to pass that President Trump TACOed the matter hard. He decided that he didn’t care. Because once again, his infinitely gullible envoy, Steve Witkoff, had met with the Russian president, and the war criminal had made some noises that excited the foolish little man. And excitement about the ludicrous notion that Mr. Putin wants a “deal” is contagious among the unvaccinated. And our president quickly caught the new strain of this very old virus. And he made public noises about land swaps, and he scheduled a summit meeting in Alaska—inviting the war criminal onto American soil to carve up the land of an ally who will not be a party to the discussion of its own dismemberment.

Let’s call it what it is: “Trump’s Folly.”

The Alaska summit is folly because, once again—even after he has publicly acknowledged his realization that he can’t trust Putin—Trump is sufficiently mesmerized by the man so as to invite him to the United States, and reportedly even meet with him one-on-one without translators or advisors present, so that Putin can once again humiliate him before the world.

It is folly because it needlessly elevates Putin to the status of world leader, when he should be the sort of figure one deals with in legal briefs and evidentiary presentations in international tribunals.

Yes, yes. One sometimes has to play ball with such fiends: There were constructive engagements to be had with Mao and Stalin and other of the vilest, most murderous dictators at various times. But you never elevate them needlessly. And you never forget whom you are dealing with.

It is folly because in its gullibility, it is profoundly dishonorable.

And it is folly because—for all the gullibility and dishonor—it will not work. There is no deal that the United States should accept that Putin will agree to. And even if Trump decides to accept an unacceptable deal, Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and it is Ukrainian acceptance of any arrangement—not American—that is required to end the war. And Ukraine will not be present in Alaska. 

The overwhelming likelihood here is that this summit flops. It’s a likelihood that even the Trump administration may be acknowledging, as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt managed expectations this week by labeling the summit a “listening exercise.” It will flop because Putin imagines he is winning this war and doesn’t want to stop it and thus will propose another set of outlandish conditions for ending the fighting—conditions that even Trump can’t accept. If that happens, the costs of Trump’s folly will be merely further humiliation: humiliation to U.S. prestige, the continued elevation of Putin into the realm of the respectable, and the continued embarrassment of Trump’s vacillations between tough-guy chest thumping and week-kneed submissiveness in the name of the “deal.”

There is a small chance, however, that Trump and Putin can reach a deal, because Trump genuinely doesn’t care at all about the Ukrainian lives at issue and because big, important men with maps sometimes draw lines that satisfy the “interests” of their countries as they define them at any given moment in time.

This would not be a folly. It would be a crime—far worse than a blunder. 

It is bad enough that Putin should come to America, to Alaska no less, for a summit with an American president; we should all pray to God that he leaves empty-handed.

Either way, The Situation continues tomorrow.