(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
President Donald Trump promised the world he’d deliver peace in Ukraine. Instead, he delivered a red carpet for Vladimir Putin — and little else.
The much-hyped Alaska “peace summit” ended not with a triumph but a whimper. The meeting itself was shorter than expected, the press conference that followed was bizarre even by Trump-era standards, and the outcome was precisely the scenario Trump himself said would constitute failure: no deal.
“We didn’t get there,” Trump admitted, a line that will likely follow him like an unwelcome nickname.
The optics were brutal. Putin opened the joint presser with a six-minute harangue delivered in Russian, a performative display of dominance that left Trump looking like an impatient understudy. Then came Trump’s turn: a meandering monologue that veered from praising Russia’s “incredible land” and “11 time zones” to relitigating the “Russia hoax” and the 2020 election. By the end, the ostensible subject of the summit — stopping a war — had been buried under a landslide of grievance and digression.
Even Fox News, usually a safe landing pad, couldn
And yet, the strangest moment may have been the literal red carpet. As Putin’s motorcade arrived, Trump not only rolled it out but clapped enthusiastically for the Russian president. Not figuratively. Literally applauded. One imagines the Kremlin’s propaganda team will run that clip on a loop, preferably with triumphant Tchaikovsky swelling in the background.
If this were a business deal, Trump would have come home empty-handed.
He promised “severe consequences” if Putin failed to strike a deal; instead, Putin left with a PR victory and zero concessions. Trump had pledged, on the way to Alaska, that he would be “unhappy” without an agreement. By his own standard, unhappiness should be the headline. But judging from his rambling Hannity interview afterward, Trump seems either unwilling or unable to grasp how thoroughly he was played.
In a pre-arranged interview immediately following the joint press conference, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Trump: “You said before the interview, you said in two minutes I will know. … What did you get?” What followed was a slurry of half-formed thoughts about rare earth minerals, hoaxes, and election rigging — part nostalgia tour, part word salad, with no discernible entrée. The question was simple: what did you get? The answer, stripped of the tangents, was equally simple:
For Putin, the payoff was obvious. He stood shoulder to shoulder with an American president, was celebrated on U.S. soil, and gave nothing in return. For Trump, the cost is harder to quantify but potentially devastating. He has painted himself into a corner with his “peace on day one” promise. Anything short of an actual cessation of hostilities looks like failure. And failure, dressed up with pomp and applause, is still failure.
When the spin is this desperate, the story is almost always worse. Trump’s defenders will argue that “talking is better than fighting,” but the issue isn’t whether Trump met with Putin — it’s that the meeting achieved nothing material for the United States or its NATO allies. What it did accomplish however was legitimizing a dictator and embarrassing the United States.
Foreign policy isn’t reality television, where declaring something “the greatest deal ever” makes it so. The world saw a U.S. president who was outmaneuvered, outtalked, and out of his depth. Allies will wonder if America’s resolve is fading; adversaries will take note of how easily Putin extracted a victory.
For a man who prides himself on showmanship, Trump should recognize that the show matters.
This one was a disaster. A president who claimed he could end the war “in 24 hours” emerged instead with a public scolding from Fox News reporters and a reel of awkward applause for a war criminal.
The Alaska summit was supposed to be Trump’s
And so the war drags on. Ukraine bleeds. Putin smirks. And Trump, who set his own impossible bar, is left clapping on the red carpet for a man who just walked all over him.