How to Make Trump Pay for Bending the Knee to Putin (Again)

Trump gets played for a fool on the world stage (again)

We know that Donald Trump sees the world through the lens of television news coverage. He cares about imagery, pomp, and circumstance. While this is an outdated and dangerously vacuous approach to the presidency, it remains the best way to understand Trump’s motivations.

The Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin was all about creating an image of Trump standing astride the world stage. Trump’s mindset is frozen in amber in the 1980s. He pictured himself playing the role of Ronald Reagan at the major summits with Mikhail Gorbachev.

From Trump’s narrow perspective, he got what he wanted from the meeting. Images of Trump standing with Putin in front of Air Force One were all over the news and emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers (something only people employed in the newspaper industry should care about). He dominated the conversation on social media.

But, as with most things related to Trump, it was a stylistic win and a massive substantive loss.

As we learned early yesterday morning, Trump got totally played by Putin (again!). Trump may have loved the images, but Putin—a war criminal—being welcomed to the United States on a literal red carpet was a massive win for Russia. And it gets much worse: here’s the New York Times account of what happened at the meeting:

President Trump on Saturday split from Ukraine and key European allies after his summit with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, backing Mr. Putin’s plan for a sweeping peace agreement based on Ukraine ceding territory it controls to Russia, instead of the urgent cease-fire Mr. Trump had said he wanted before the meeting.

Skipping cease-fire discussions would give Russia an advantage in the talks, which are expected to continue on Monday when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visits Mr. Trump at the White House. It breaks from a strategy Mr. Trump and European allies, as well as Mr. Zelensky, had agreed to before the U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska.

Mr. Trump told European leaders that he believed a rapid peace deal could be negotiated if Mr. Zelensky agreed to give up the rest of the Donbas region to Russia, even those areas not occupied by Russian troops.

Under this framework, Trump is abandoning Ukraine and Europe and rewarding Russia for the original sin of invading Ukraine.

This is what happens when you send a naive, suggestible, aging reality star into a meeting with a KGB operative turned dictator. There is so much to say about this stunning—but not shocking—capitulation from Trump. However, I want to focus on how Democrats can capitalize on this moment.