Reporting on the High Stakes 31-Country Fight Over Flattering the World’s Most Volatile Narcissist
WaPo had an exceptionally good summary of what happened in the European leaders’ meeting with President Trump yesterday. In just the first three paragraphs, it described the speed, the unity, the goal, and the outcome — effectively, to make it clear Putin remains the obstacle to peace.
In hurried D.C. summit, Europeans try to bend Trump away from Kremlin
Leaders of European and NATO countries presented a united front Monday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, after racing to Washington hoping to steer President Donald Trump away from some of the concessions he appeared ready to grant the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine.
After several hours of meetings, sharp differences remained evident between the leaders and Trump, who declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready for peace, even as he has continued his bombardment of Ukraine and demanded that Kyiv make sweeping, painful concessions to stop the war.
But Ukrainian and European leaders appeared encouraged by Trump’s openness to security guarantees for Ukraine, which Putin might not accept. That could make the Kremlin the obstacle to Trump’s peace deal, insulating Ukraine from having to choose between untenable concessions of territory and inviting Trump’s ire.
Over eight articles, that was more than the NYT could muster.
In addition to an article on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s suit (which WaPo matched) and an entire article on a letter attributed to Melania Trump shared with Putin, barely updated with mention of Olena Zelenska’s letter to Melania, NYT had two separate articles on flattery, one professional, one from MoDo’s protégé, Shawn McCreesh. (WaPo did dedicate an article on how many times Europeans thanked Trump.) What feels like NYT’s main story on the meeting — bylined by Maggie Haberman, David Sanger, and Jim Tankersley — measured the meeting in terms of a peace deal (that is, Trump’s perspective), not Ukrainian security; it was placed in the upper right corner of the front page, not where a main story would be. The top-left story, in that lead position, instead focused on whether Zelenskyy could trust Trump, still making Trump the hero of the story. Sanger also wrote a short article on what it would take for a military force to be credible. Then there’s the Five Takeaways article that seemed to understand none of the dynamic laid out in WaPo’s first three paragraphs.
Yet even the professional NYT story on the effort to use flattery, by Neil MacFarquhar, still missed several dynamics of the effort. It focused on the immediate, apparently successful, stalling of Trump’s capitulation to Putin.
But there is a larger goal to the flattery and it’s not just to help Trump achieve a meaningful peace deal (as distinct from a political win). As WaPo described in ¶12, this is about the security of all of Europe.
Monday’s unusual group meeting at the White House continued an extraordinary sequence of diplomacy that could shape security in Europe for a generation, with European leaders fearing that Putin was getting the upper hand in the breakneck peace effort. Trump reveled at Monday’s tableau, saying that the White House had never seen such a collection of prime ministers and presidents, all of whom dropped what they were doing to rush to Washington to try to salvage Ukraine’s security.
The goal was to prevent Trump from capitulating to Russia and in the process leaving Europe vulnerable to follow-on attacks. The goal of flattering Trump was, presumably, if not to persuade him (for example, that the cease fire idea he abandoned because Putin told him to, is necessary), then to present the unanimous commitment to the things Steve Witkoff naively claimed Russia also backed, starting with security guarantees.
Along the way, Zelenskyy and the others made asks — for powerful US weapons to use to fend off Russian attacks, for troops (presumably including troops from NATO countries, along with Ireland) in Ukraine to guarantee the peace, for a face-to-face meeting that would position Zelenskyy as Putin’s equal — that will be impossible for Putin to accept. The last of those, a face-to-face meeting, is one of the things Trump discussed when he spoke with Putin during the meeting, like calling for a lifeline; as WSJ reports, Russia is already equivocating on that goal.
There are several possible outcomes of publicly celebrating goals that Witkoff (whom Michael Weiss has dubbed “Dim Philby”) claims Russia wants, too. Most immediately, it might get Trump to sour on Putin again, and demand Putin make some concessions or face sanctions. Barring that, it would help create the perception that Trump’s capitulation is just that, an embrace of Putin’s plan that doesn’t offer what Trump wants to claim it does, which will make Trump’s capitulation more politically costly for him. And if that happens, it matters that both the leader of the EU and of NATO were in DC backing Ukraine: Those are the alliances that Trump would need to snub to make that capitulation, with all the significance it holds.
Trump wanted to do this for free. Putin wanted Trump to do this for free. It was part of the point, for Putin. The visit thwarted that plan.
Perhaps my favorite moment in the public events of the day came when Trump invited Alexander Stubb, Finland’s President, to speak. Stubb golfs with Trump and so is chummy with him (which didn’t prevent Trump from not recognizing him), but his country is among those that Russia would target if Trump were to enable follow-up attacks. Stubb labeled Russia’s invasion as a war of aggression but reminded that even small countries can withstand such invasions, as Finland did after WWII.
Some of the international media might wonder, “Why is the President of Finland here?” I think the reason is probably that we might come from a small country, but we have a long border with Russia, over 800 miles. We’ve our own historical experience with Russia from World War II, the Winter War, the War of Continuation. And if I look at the silver lining of where we stand right now, we found a solution in 1944, I’m sure that we’ll be able to find a solution in 2025 to end Russia’s war of aggression. The situation is very difficult but that’s why we’re here.
A Finn, from a country with the lived experience of facing down Russia, promised that “we” — which might include Trump or not — will find “a solution to end Russia’s war of aggression,” a war that extends far beyond Ukraine.
Sure, Donald Trump didn’t give the Europeans the sycophantic treatment he accorded Putin.
But because they played to his narcissism, it provided a platform to make the case that most American journalists won’t make, one which most of Trump’s handlers are incompetent to make: That if Trump does capitulate, it will not serve peace.
Here’s what NYT doesn’t seem to understand, for its flood of flattering portrayals of Trump as the hero of all things.
Other people, when they rush to play to the man’s narcissism, do so with specific goals and a clear sense of how his narcissism makes him easy to manipulate.
A man so easily swayed by flattery as Trump is, is weak, not the hero of all things the NYT portrays him as. And only if you understand that can you make such flattery useful.
Update: NYT has since added this analysis, which is far better at describing the state of play.
In my high school history classes we read about the English kings who were manipulated by the French. Now we can all viscerally appreciate those episodes from the past.
It would be a mistake to disregard the objective factors that explain Trump’s soft stance vs Putin much better than any of his (numerous but banal) character weaknesses.
I mean, what if Trump embraced Putin’s demands mainly because, based on empirical data, he simply realized that Russia cannot be defeated. What if he realized that all attempts to win the war have been in vain: NATO is unable to arm a Ukrainian counter-offensive with even a faint chance of success.
Maybe he sees that Russia is advancing and Putin has aimed his atomic bombs at Ukraine. Maybe faces turned “ashen” because Putin (once again) made clear that he wouldn’t hesitate to strike Ukraine with nuclear warheads. And surely the USA, even under its dumbest leaders, will never risk a nuclear confrontation with Russia over some pieces of land in a far-off country.
And maybe he abandoned the idea of a ceasefire because he realized it would not stop Europe from continuing to demand Putin’s unconditional retreat from all of Ukraine, ignoring that, if the fighting in the Donbass continues, Putin will continue to bomb Kiev and Ukraine will eventually lose even more of its territory.
Sounds like you are advocating for Vlad.
While all that may be true, I do not think Putin is stupid enough to risk nuclear war either.
US and the EU can still impose more sanctions to bring the Russian economy to its knees and should do so.
“If” and “maybe” are doing a lot of lifting here. It’s as though you are considering Trump to be a rational actor. “Empirical Data” suggests otherwise.
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I appreciate the discussion of Trump’s possible reliance on empirical facts to explain his recent flips and flops (“50 days! No, 10 days! No, meet me in Alaska!”), but Trump’s unquestioning acceptance of Putin’s lies (“no other country uses voting by mail!”, “if Ukraine doesn’t surrender all of the oblasts I’ve failed to take since 2014, I’ll just take them!”) disproves that theory for me.
Trump believes Putin, and so does Witkoff (“dim Philby”). The End.
“And surely the USA, even under its dumbest leaders, will never risk a nuclear confrontation with Russia over some pieces of land in a far-off country.” – WOW.
You might want to check the actual distance from Washington to every other NATO country except Canada. They are ALL “far off countries”, and “risking a nuclear confrontation” has been the bottom line for NATO since its formation.
That was the last-ditch tactic to stop the Soviet Union bloc, if it decided to take West Germany (just to name the most obvious target).
Google “Fulda Gap”.
LOL. Maybe Trump will smell the roses, tear up his stones, and replant the Rose Garden.
Your comment seems to attribute Trump’s activities to some idea of national interest, some shared conception of that, and, frankly, that ship has sailed.
But I want to ask, how does Putin threatening Ukraine with nuclear warheads, supposedly, become Putin threatening us with them? There is a strange sleight of hand in your rhetoric, almost as if you came here to promote the propaganda of nuclear terror. For my part, if Putin maneuvers the American people into the position we become terrorized by nuclear fear of Russia, it will be within an unfolding kayfabe spectacle with political rationale. Many informed observers believe Trump and Putin are coordinating to end American democracy, and at this stage, nuclear terror would justify Trump’s role as our Dear Leader.
Russia cannot be defeated huh? Hey Alexa, what is the Soviet Afghan war?
“based on empirical data” – what data? Are you basing this conjecture on data about Ukraine versus Russia, NATO versus Russia? You certainly cannot be claiming the the world’s 3rd largest military based on personnel could not defeat Russia when the only thing holding the US back from easily blowing Putin off the face of the planet is Trump’s narcissism and daddy issues combined with quisling GOP, NATO’s articles, and just enough citizens who still believe in bellum iustum.
“NATO is unable to arm a Ukrainian counter-offensive” – again, how do you support this possible conjecture? NATO can do this easily combining EU military with US if Trump wasn’t holding the GOP in thrall and he wasn’t intent on destroying NATO himself. We also haven’t seen the rest of NATO take its gloves off yet — close, but not yet.
“Putin (once again) made clear that he wouldn’t hesitate to strike Ukraine with nuclear warheads” — the same dude who was acting sketchy back in Moscow, who has heightened air security around his bloated Valdai dacha (and destroyed his Sochi dacha)?
“maybe he abandoned the idea of a ceasefire” — how about Occam’s razor here, the same one Netanyahu has applied with Gaza: Trump is a spineless narcissist whose existence is transactional. They need not make any effort at ceasefire because Trump has no morals, no ethics, and zero true patriotism, demonstrated repeatedly in both his first and second terms. I don’t even need links to support this given how many times Trump has kissed both Putin’s and Netanyahu’s asses in public.
It’s a mistake to publish a comment with so little supporting documentation to bolster what-ifs.
Some supporting evidence
1) NATO armed the Ukrainian counter-offensive of June 2023 to the point of even emptying its own stocks, and yet it ended in a disastrous failure – which is why I conclude it cannot arm another one. And this year, June 10, Mark Rutte declared: “In terms of ammunition, Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year.”
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_235867.htm
2) The US government has consistently treated Putin’s nuclear threats as a credible and serious risk. E.g.
Jack Sullivan and Antony Blinken:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/26/politics/us-warns-putin-nuclear-weapons-analysis
or more recently Vipin Narang and other US officials:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/vladimir-putin-draws-a-nuclear-red-line-for-the-west-how-credible-is-it/articleshow/113707071.cms
So let’s return our regular broadcasting back to reality. Putin is failing and will almost certainly fail.
First, if you bothered to read the blog post you would recognize that strategically Putin has managed to coalesce almost the entirety of Europe (as well as other aligned democracies) against Russia. Europe is arming and acting collectively in response to Putin in ways never seen before and frankly difficult to imagine not that long ago. European defense spending on Ukraine already exceeds US spending.
Second, Russia faces the existential threat of collapsing as a nation state. Putin scurried off to Alaska (exposing himself to risks internal and external) for the primary purpose of stopping the imposition of secondary sanctions. Trump is wildly erratic and mentally decomposing, and the Russians can see this as well as anyone. If the secondary sanctions took hold and Russian sales of oil and gas to Chine, India, and Turkey came to an end Russia would likely collapse economically in the space of a few months. It cannot replace the hundreds of billions in revenues from these sales and on top of the existing economic stresses it is game over.
Third, Russia is losing on the battlefield. Since November 2022, Russia has suffered over 1 million casualties in exchange for conquering approximately 1% of Ukraine’s territory. It has lost extraordinary amounts of hardware it cannot replace. It is being technically outmatched by Ukrainian (European supported) military innovation. Ukraine just announced a Ukrainian built cruise missile with a 3000 km range.
Fourth, there are significant power struggles and purges going on within elite Russian circles. Russia lacks the necessary non-corrupt leadership to pursue the Ukraine war and it is unclear who in the power structure will survive in the coming months.
Now you won’t find these observations in the MSM. So let me suggest some youtube channels: Jason Jay Smart; Ukraine Matters; Reporting from Ukraine; Anna from Ukraine; Econ Lessons: Vlad Vexler; and I could go on but I doubt you would be interested.
Occam’s razor: Trump and his team are in way over their heads. Any negotiation that cannot be accomplished by playground bullying or Trump’s so-called “charm offensive” will be out of reach for this administration.
Occam’s razor, as a metaphor to analyze Trump’s conduct, is highly overrated.
Excellent analysis.
That the N.Y. Times asked if Zelenskyy could trust Trump speaks volumes about the depths to which the country has sunk. Do the analysts and editors not understand this?
The news media can get so wrapped up in the TikTok that it fails to understand the gravity of this moment. And The NY Times can’t seem to shake its preference for seeing everything through the lens of domestic politics.
The heads of state of the European countries came to see Trump because they understand that Putin will not stop with Ukraine. This is existential for Europeans. The unusual, last minute nature of the diplomatic push should be setting off alarm bells. Yet the news media wants to hit the snooze button.
I appreciate this post even more than most of your posts, and I appreciate all of your posts.
I wish every American would catch the “dim Philby” characterization of Witkoff. I am positive I could do a better job, if only because I would accept support from US State Department.
I think there is also the chance that the NYT is affirmatively and consciously flattering Trump for their own ends, specifically vs Bezos and the WaPo. Bezos has chosen to stifle their editorial page, and thrown millions at Trump and his various committees (campaign, inauguration, library). The NYT — the hometown paper from whom Trump most wants approval — is throwing fawning coverage at him. They minimized and finally pushed out voices like Nobel-winning economist Krugman, and encourage Maggie Habs and her ilk.
I have been stuck on Stafford Beer’s heuristic “The purpose of a system is what it does” since I used it in a post recently.
What has the NYT’s been doing? Fluffing Trump. What is the NYT’s purpose? Apparently it’s fluffing Trump.
[Yes, readers, I know what “fluffing” is in the sex industry. You need not waste our time and pixels persuading me massaging a malignant narcissist’s ego in print is not the same as keeping his tiny mushroom inflated. You do you.]
Good to see you, Rayne!
*wink*
“Dim Philby” is precious.
It has that hapless, piquant flavor of an agent so inept, he becomes a double agent without knowing it, while dissing the subject, who, being so ignorant, doesn’t get the reference or that he’s being made fun of
Perhaps many more folks would consider joining a few of us who have recently begun to actively (daily) use the NYT ‘comments’ section not to espouse a view on the incident or issue covered in an article but to instead submit pithy comments focused on the particular article’s editorial elements — such as noting the disservice to readers when an individual piece uses the tired red/blue framing as well as the close-to-parody normalizing obfuscation that ends up conveying something wildly detached from what has actually taken place.
Even if nothing happens, it is a win for Zelenskyy because he and the European leaders will have learned how to handle Trump on somewhat even ground with Putin and the sanctions are biting Putin. Ironically, of all the tariffs Trump’s imposing unilaterally, the ones threatened against Russian oil importers are the ones most likely to stand up in court: short-term, based on emergent circumstances, and targeted against specific actions against national interest.
It’s just gross that the incompetent orange pig has inserted himself into this war as “deal maker.” Who died and made him “deal maker?” Just what Ukraine needs – a C-grade business student with six business bankruptcies and the intelligence of an earthworm, making “deals” on their behalf.
Minor quibble: Trump’s kinda putty-colored these days.
The EU leaders all said on camera they want the war to end. Unless I missed it, no leader at the mutual flattery fest yesterday stepped up and advocated for an escalation to defeat Russia. Too bad.
What you didn’t see happen yesterday is that stepping up to defeat Putin is the fallback position, when diplomacy doesn’t work. It was on everyone’s mind or they wouldn’t have been there. Except for Trump, that is.
Of course continued war is a possibility, and at least as likely as some negotiated peace deal. If negotiations fall apart, expect the EU to dramatically ramp up their support, which could include their troops on the ground.
They do want the war to end. Everybody does, except Vlad, poison dwarf of the Kremlin Bunker. And they do now realise the stakes at play. Macron, for example, is long over the many ‘agonised’ pleadings on the phone. He now calls Russia the “hungry troll at the gates who has to keep on eating to survive”.
The visiting European leaders are all democratic politicians, though, and have to deal with a public and media that in the main, unlike themselves, has not yet properly awoken to harsh realities. Not helped by the barrage of insidious Russian propaganda and funding of disruptor parties of both ultra-right and ultra-left. But changes are already afoot quietly in the background. German funding of arms production both at home and in Ukraine has soared since that weak loser Scholz was shown the door, for example.
In the longer term, Europe will fund its own armaments and stop “buying American”. It will have to. It can no longer afford to depend on fragile US elections.