Yeah, he’s done a great job.
More presidenting by whim:
Russian officials and commentators crowed about landing a summit between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump on Friday in Alaska, the first time the Russian leader has been invited to the United States outside the United Nations since 2007 — and apparently without the Kremlin having made any clear concessions over its war in Ukraine.
European and Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, scrambled to respond to the administration’s sudden reversal. Days before announcing the summit Friday, Trump was expressing frustration over Putin’s continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities and threatening to ratchet up sanctions on Russia.
[…]
Sam Greene, professor in Russian politics at King’s College London, said the venue favored Russia. “The symbolism of holding the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska is horrendous — as though designed to demonstrate that borders can change, land can be bought and sold,” Greene said. “Never mind that mainstream Russian discourse maintains a claim that Alaska should be returned to Russia.”
A key difference: Czar Alexander II offered to sell Alaska. Putin has seized Ukrainian territory by force, illegally annexing Crimea in 2014 and launching the full invasion and illegally claiming to annex four other Ukrainian regions in 2022.
Trump’s all in favor of annexing. If Alaska didn’t have oil he’d probably give it back to Vlad as a gift.
Apparently, some of this can be attributed to Trump’s unqualified, incompetent “envoy” Steve Witkoff:
According to The Wall Street Journal, Witkoff presented Putin’s ceasefire plan to European officials after he met with the Russian leader. Citing anonymous sources, the publication said Moscow was prepared to withdraw from the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for full control of Donetsk Oblast.
The publication said that the next day, he presented a different claim—that Putin would withdraw and freeze the front line, and that during a third call, he said the Russian leader wanted Ukraine to withdraw from Donetsk in an exchange for a ceasefire.
McFaul, now a Stanford University academic said: “This is deeply damaging incompetence. Witkoff should finally start taking a note taker from the U.S. embassy for future meetings. That’s how professional diplomacy works.”
Meanwhile, other figures also criticized Witkoff. Journalist Michael Weiss wrote: “The U.S. envoy is grossly incompetent and his confusion is causing diplomatic crises.”
Read the entire Wall St. Journal article here. (gift link) It looks to me as if Trump is so eager for the Nobel Prize that he’s ready to let Putin walk all over him again in the hopes that he can push Ukraine and the Europeans to accept an unacceptable agreement. All it takes is for Vlad to whisper a few sweet nothings into his ear to get him to back off.