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Trump Family Cashes in on Two Big Deals, Involving United Arab Emirates

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2025 //
11

The New York Times published a shocking story about the enrichment of the Trump family by two big deals that were supposed to be unrelated but probably were not.

Trump selected his close friend Steve Witkoff as his Middle East envoy, although Witkoff has no prior experience as a diplomat. Witkoff is a real estate lawyer and a developer, also a billionaire. Witkoff is also Trump’s special envoy to Putin. Witkoff’s son Zach is a partner in the crypto business with Eric Trump and Don Trump Jr. They are partners in World Liberty Financial.

This summer, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, paid a visit to the coast of Sardinia, a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea crowded with super yachts.

On one of those extravagant vessels, Mr. Witkoff sat down with a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. He was meeting Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a trim figure in dark glasses who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.

It was the latest engagement in a consequential alliance.

Over the past few months, Mr. Witkoff and Sheikh Tahnoon had become both diplomatic allies and business partners, testing the limits of ethics rules while enriching the president, his family and his inner circle, according to an investigation by The New York Times.

At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically.

While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary. Taken together, they blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served.

In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.

Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.

Those negotiations involved another key White House official with ties to the tech industry and to the Middle East: David Sacks. A longtime venture capitalist, Mr. Sacks serves as the administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, a newly created position that has allowed him to shape tech policy even as he continues to work in Silicon Valley.

This story must have rattled Trump because a few days after it appeared, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, for defamation.

Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC commented that this may be the most ridiculous lawsuit ever filed and explains the dubious mega deals that enriched the Trump and the Witkoffs.

O’Donnell naturally wonders what Republicans would say if Biden were involved in a deal like that. Yet they are silent about Jared Kushner getting a $2 billion investment from the Saudis and the Trump sons getting another $2 billion.

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, International, Trump

Trump’s Tariffs and Foreign Policy are a Disaster for U.S.

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2025 //
13

Writing in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria explains how Trump has driven pivotal countries–like India, Brazil, and South Africa–into the embrace of our enemies: Russia, China, and North Korea. For his own bizarre and inexplicable reasons, Trump has tried to cozy up to the leaders of those countries, which have a common interest in opposing democratic countries. He has boasted about his close friendship with Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un, but they are laughing at him. Trump’s insane tariffs have been harsh towards our allies, which makes no sense at all.

Zakaria wrote:

Look at the pictures that dominated this week’s world news. They are vivid illustrations of the failures of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

The photographs that captured most attention were of China’s massive military parade and of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un striding together. Those visuals were to be expected — a reminder that the West faces a determined set of adversaries who see it as their mission to destroy the Western-led international order.

What was surprising were the images from the days before, when the Shanghai Cooperation Organization hosted leaders from India, Turkey, Vietnam and Egypt, among others. All these regional powers were generally considered closer to Washington than Beijing. But a toxic combination of tariffs, hostile rhetoric and ideological demands is moving many of the world’s pivotal states away from the United States and toward China. It might be the greatest own goal in modern foreign policy.

Consider the BRICS, a grouping of countries originally meant to represent the big emerging markets of the future — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — along with several other members now, too. At meetings, three of the core countries, Brazil, India and South Africa, would generally resist the Russian and Chinese effort to turn the organization into an anti-American grouping. For decades, Washington has been building ties with these three countries, each a leader in its region, to ensure that as they grew in size and stature, they would be favorably inclined toward the United States.

But Trump has treated those pivotal states to some of his most vicious rhetoric and aggressive policies. He unleashed the highest tariff rate in the world against India. He punished Brazil with equally high tariffs and levied sanctions and visa bans against Brazilian officials. South Africa faces 30 percent tariffs, a total cutoff of foreign aid and potential sanctions against government officials.

The governments and people in these countries are outraged at their treatment. India used to be overwhelmingly pro-American. Now it is rapidly shifting toward a deep suspicion of Washington. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s sagging poll numbers have risen as he stands up to Trump’s bullying. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa gained stature when he politely responded to Trump’s Oval Office hectoring. It is worth remembering that other countries have nationalist sentiment, too!

There is no strategic rationale for these policy reversals. Trump is punishing Brazil because that country’s independent courts are holding accountable Trump’s ideological soulmate, Jair Bolsonaro, for his efforts to reject the results of free and fair elections. South Africa faces Trump’s ire because of a land reform law that is an attempt to address some of the vast disparities in landholding and wealth caused by decades of apartheid. These reasons have nothing to do with restoring America’s manufacturing base or reducing trade deficits. The U.S. actually runs a trade surplus with Brazil.

While Washington has been alienating these countries, China has been courting them. It has outlined a plan with Brazil for a transformative railway network connecting its Atlantic coast to Peru’s Pacific one. Xi managed to get Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit China for the first time in seven years. China has courted South Africa with trade and aid, and public sentiment in that country has moved to be quite favorably inclined toward Beijing.

We are often told that Trump likes to talk tough to get the best deal. But his policies are producing real pain and misery on the ground — people losing their jobs and many being pushed back into poverty. That’s why even if these deals are renegotiated and things settle on less brutal terms, the memories will linger. Countries will always know that Washington could treat them as it has and they will want to hedge their bets and keep strong ties with China and Russia, just in case.

American foreign policy these days is a collection of the random slights, insults and ideological obsessions of one man. In general, Trump likes smaller countries he can bully or ideological soulmates who cozy up to him. He doesn’t enjoy dealing with large, messy democracies with their own internal dynamics, pride and nationalism.

Thus, America under Trump has befriended a strange collection of strongmen, in El Salvador, Hungary, Pakistan and the Gulf monarchies. It is at odds with the democracies of India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Canada and most of Europe. Does this make any sense?

Categories Democracy, Economy, International, Stupid, Trump

The Atlantic: Other World Leaders Laugh at Trump

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2025 //
12

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic published an article that explained why Trump is a laughing stock among other world leaders. The recent meeting of the leaders of China, Russia, North Korea, and India was convened to celebrate the victory over Japan in 1945. Trump was not invited. He proceeded to write whiny complaints on social media about being left out.

They laugh at him. They saw how Putin played Trump like a violin when they met in Alaska. The meeting was supposedly about Putin agreeing to a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump rolled out a red carpet for Putin. Waited for him, clapped his hands in excitement as Putin approached. At the meeting’s end, Putin spoke first, which is not customary. Then he departed, skipping a lunch that Trump planned in his honor.

Putin made a fool of Trump.

The next night, Russia bombsrded Kyiv with an unprecedented number of drones and missiles, aimed at civilian targets.

Putin and the others know that Pete Hegseth is an empty suit. Trump busies himself redecorating the White House and its grounds. Trump is not a serious man. He can be ignored.

Nichols began:

The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.

Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.

Categories Evil, Extremism, International, Stupid, Trump

Why is Trump Destroying the Foreign Service?

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2025 //
2

Politico posted an article about the demoralization of career foreign service officers. DOGE laid off many of the top diplomats, and everyone who remains is walking on eggshells, unsure if they will be next. It seems that Trump’s version of “America First” is actually “America Only,” and he doesn’t care about our relationships with other nations. In earlier times, he would have been called an isolationist.

Trump treats allies as enemies, but adores Putin, no matter how frequently Putin humiliates him (as he did at their meeting in Alaska, where Putin departed before a luncheon in his honor, as he did when Russian state media published nude photos of Melania before the 2024 election).

Foreign service officers are afraid of saying the wrong thing. They don’t feel free to express dissent or even to communicate, fearing that someone is watching and any disagreement will get them into trouble.

Naval Toosi reported:

President Donald Trump promised to reform American diplomacy. Insiders say he’s breaking it instead, to the point where he’s undermining his own global influence.

Eight months into Trump’s second term, more than half of U.S. ambassadorships, an unusually high amount, are vacant. Most top State Department roles are filled on an acting basis, often by people with little relevant experience. Many U.S. diplomats, especially those overseas, are largely cut out of policy talks while struggling to implement administration orders they say are confusing. Many also are too afraid to speak up because they could be fired or lose a promotion under new rules that measure their “fidelity.” They’ve already seen thousands of their colleagues pushed out and many offices dismantled.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, International, Stupid, Trump

Brilliant Speech by President of Finland on the Path to Peace in Ukraine

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2025 //
4

Please watch. I am sorry this clip appears on Instagram. If anyone can find an independent link, please add. It is a powerful speech that reminds me what it’s like to have an intelligent, articulate national leader. That makes me sad.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNiok7rx5sW/?igsh=OWkyZ294NHRoM3Zs

Categories Courage, Democracy, Freedom, History, International

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Goes Off the Rails

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2025 //
5

Trump has a fragile ego in need of constant stroking. When he doesn’t get enough, he praises himself. Two posts appeared overnight that I recommend. One, by the esteemed Heather Cox Richardson, is posted here. The other, by Robert Hubbell, is well worth reading.

Heather Cox Richardson reviews yesterday’s bizarre summit at the White House, where European leaders tried to convince Trump to support a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump favored a ceasefire until he met with Putin last Friday, then dropped the idea. Strangest of all, Trump abruptly left the meeting to have a 40-minute conversation with Putin. Our allies had no choice but to stand by until Trump finished his private chat with the Russian tyrant. Was he calling for instructions?

Someday historians might be able to explain Trump’s bizarre reliance on Putin.

She writes:

This morning, J.D. Wolf of Meidas News pulled together all of Trump’s self-congratulatory posts from Sunday morning, when the president evidently was boosting his ego after Friday’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Trump shared an AI-generated meme of himself with a large male lion standing next to him and the words “Peace through Strength. Anyone can make war, but only most courageous [sic] can make peace.” He posted memes claiming he is the “best president…in American history” and the “G[reatest] O[f] A[ll] T[ime], a “legend.”

Trump also reposted material from two QAnon-related accounts and pushed the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party is “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” Trump has faced a rebellion among his QAnon supporters as he and administration officials have refused to release information from the federal investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and have moved Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking children, to a minimum-security prison camp and given her work-release privileges. It appears he’s working to make QAnon supporters forget that he was named in those files and to lure them back to his support.

For their part, Russia Today trolled Trump’s “peace through strength” boast this morning by posting a video of an armored vehicle first going slowly on a road and then dramatically speeding up. The vehicle was flying both Russian and U.S. flags.

Trump’s social media account this morning posted a long screed saying the president is “going to lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines, and lying that the U.S. is the only country that uses mail-in voting because it is rife with fraud. As usual, the post claimed that Democrats “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE” and claimed they “are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.” The post said he would sign an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Then the post claimed that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

This is bonkers across the board. Dozens of countries use mail-in voting, and there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. Just today, news broke that right-wing channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to Dominion Voting Systems for spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been rigged to give the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Combining that sum with the $787 million Fox News paid for spreading the same lies means, as Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote today, that media entities have paid out nearly $900 million “for publishing lies about the 2020 presidential election. Yet Donald Trump, who lost by more than seven million votes, keeps repeating the Big Lie and makes it compulsory dogma for his employees.”

Certainly, if Democratic leaders were so unelectable, the Republicans would not go to such lengths to rig district voting maps and keep Democratic voters from the polls. Indeed, while voter fraud is vanishingly rare, the Republicans are using the specter of it to engage in election fraud: manipulating the mechanics of an election to favor one side over another.

This manipulation is happening dramatically right now in Texas, where Trump pressured Governor Greg Abbott to redistrict the state in a highly unusual mid-decade map change in order to set Republicans up to gain five more seats in Congress in the next election. Abbott dutifully called a special session of the legislature to change the maps. Texas Democrats tried to stop the redistricting by leaving the state to deprive the Republicans of a quorum, that is, the minimum number of lawmakers necessary to conduct business. They stayed away until the special session expired. Abbott immediately called another one.

Today, with it clear Abbott would simply call special sessions until they returned, the Democratic legislators went back to Texas fifteen days after they left. “We killed the corrupt special session, withstood unprecedented surveillance and intimidation, and rallied Democrats nationwide to join this existential fight for fair representation—reshaping the entire 2026 landscape,” said the leader of the Texas House Democrats Gene Wu, acknowledging the protests across Texas at the legislative steal. “We’re returning to Texas more dangerous to Republicans’ plans than when we left. Our return allows us to build the legal record necessary to defeat this racist map in court, take our message to communities across the state and country, and inspire legislators across the country how to fight these undemocratic redistricting schemes in their own statehouses.”

Finally, the U.S. Constitution is very clear that no president has the power to dictate election rules. The framers were determined to prevent that power from falling into the hands of a potential dictator and so gave it to the states and Congress, establishing that “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

These obvious lies make it seem crystal clear that Trump and his loyalists are preparing to reject any election results that they don’t like.

Trump’s panic about facing voters is increasingly evident. His job approval ratings are already abysmal, and the fallout from his tariffs and deportations is only now beginning to show. Last Thursday, a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the Producer Price Index—wholesale costs that will likely show up later in consumer costs—jumped 0.9% in July, the largest jump since June 2022, when the U.S. was mired in post-pandemic inflation. The wholesale price of vegetables jumped 38.9% in July.

On Friday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the budget reconciliation bill (called by Republicans the OBBBA, for “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”) that adds $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade will trigger cuts of up to $491 billion in Medicare (not a typo) from 2027 to 2034 in addition to its cuts of almost a trillion dollars to Medicaid over the next ten years. The 2010 Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act (S-PAYGO) automatically triggers cuts to government programs if the budget deficit increases as it is expected to under the new law, and Medicare spending would be on the chopping block.

Although Democrats called attention to this threat to Medicare during debates over the measure, Republicans promised their cuts to Medicaid would target only “waste, fraud, and abuse” and promised they would not touch Medicare.

Today Marty Schladen of the Ohio Capital Journal showed what those cuts actually look like in one state. Schladen reported that the cuts to Medicaid will take insurance from 310,000 people. Schladen also noted that the law ended the “enhanced premium tax credit” that made health insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s insurance markets more affordable for those who make between 100% and 400% of federal poverty guidelines. More than 530,000 people in Ohio have benefited from the program. Their premiums will go up dramatically when it expires at the end of this year, and experts warn that more than 100,000 healthier people will drop their coverage. That loss, in turn, will drive up costs for those remaining in the market.

Scott Horsley of NPR reported on Saturday that electricity prices in the country have “jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the last year.” Prices are going up as producers export liquid natural gas and as data centers swallow energy to fuel the AI boom.

Elected on his promises to lower prices, Trump is in trouble with those who believed those promises. Today, former Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, formally announced his candidacy for the Senate seat vacated when J.D. Vance became vice president. Brown noted that in Ohio, which has a population of about 12 million people, “half a million are going to lose their [health] insurance. These are mostly working families that are working for an employer that doesn’t provide insurance, or they’re kids, or they’re seniors, or they’re disabled people. Those are the people who are losing their health insurance. People didn’t vote for that. They didn’t vote for drug prices to go up. They didn’t vote for higher grocery bills. They didn’t vote for veterans’ benefits being slashed. They didn’t vote for any of this.”

On Thursday, the Pew Research Center reported that only 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, with 61% disapproving of it.

And then there is the increasing evidence that Trump is unable to manage the presidency. Today Trump met with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, United Kingdom prime minister Keir Starmer, and Finnish president Alexander Stubb. That so many foreign leaders dropped everything to rush to Washington, D.C., after Trump’s meeting with Putin on Friday indicated their alarm. The leaders reiterated that Putin started the war and could stop it at any time, and pressed Trump to back a ceasefire.

At today’s meetings, Trump repeated Russian talking points, complained about how poorly he is treated, said he had ended six wars, insisted that voting in the U.S. is full of fraud, and suggested he would cancel the 2028 elections. By the late afternoon, the president was unable to recognize President Stubb, who was sitting directly across the table from him. “President Stubb of Finland,” Trump said. Looking around, Trump continued: “And he’s uh, he’s somebody that, where are we here? Huh? Where? Where?” Stubb said, “I’m right here.” Trump focused on him and answered: “Oh. You look better than I’ve ever seen you look.”

This evening, CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes reported that Trump paused his negotiation with European leaders to call Vladimir Putin. Her source said that European leaders were not present for the conversation. Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York Times reported that the call was forty minutes long.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Failure, International, Trump

James Fallows on the Alaska Summit

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2025 //
8

James Fallows is a veteran journalist who has been writing about foreign affairs for decades. He notes the symbolism and messaging embedded in the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska.

Fallows writes:

Those with experience in US-Russian relations have been quick and near-unanimous in pointing out that Vladimir Putin got nearly everything he could have wanted¹ from his encounter yesterday with Donald Trump. And no one else got anything at all. 

-“No one else” includes the people and government of Ukraine; the people and governments of Europe and the broader NATO alliance; and the people of the United States. (Contrast Trump’s obsequiousness to Putin with his open hostility in the Oval Office toward Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy six months ago.) 

-It also includes the person who cares about imagery and theatrics more than anything else. But who let himself be owned and mocked by a foreign leader, in a way that people around the world recognized more quickly than he did himself. Of course I am talking about Donald Trump.

Consider the Trump-Putin “press conference” yesterday afternoon that permitted no questions but involved something even stranger than that.

-This was a joint presentation on US soil. Indeed, on a US military base.

-Its two figures were heads of state, of major countries.

-Because this was in the United States, and because a president of the United States is presumptively the most powerful figure at any gathering, the American president should have been unquestionably in charge. 

In every previous such event I have seen, the American president has always taken control. The president steps first to the microphone and begins the proceedings. He welcomes guests and foreign counterparts. He frames the issues. He expresses American ambitions, values, and interests. 

He acts, in effect, not just as host but also as the boss. No one doubts who is in charge. 

And he does this all in English. Even if he could speak other languages. (Several presidents have been functional in a variety of languages, including Herbert Hoover in Chinese.) He does this because he is in the United States. We are playing by his home country’s rules. In ways stated and unstated, he signals that he is running things.

But yesterday, in every conceivable way, Vladimir Putin was in command. I will mention a surprisingly powerful bit of stage business, through which Putin established his alpha-leader dominance over the eager puppy-like supplicant Trump.

At the joint press event yesterday, Putin spoke first. This may sound like nothing. But it was an enormous power move, which the Trump team must idiotically have agreed to. To my knowledge, no American president has ever let it happen before. 

It would be like a lawyer speaking first at a trial, rather than the judge. Or like a graduate speaking first at commencement, pre-empting the university president. It simply would not occur. Maybe Trump, in his entertainment-world role, was thinking of Putin as the “warm-up act”? I can guarantee that the event was not viewed that way in any foreign ministry around the world. 

Then, after he had kicked off the event by taking the mic, Putin went on to establish even more clearly who was boss. He spoke at great length—more than twice as long as Trump eventually did. Trump’s eventual response was his usual ramble, rather than Putin’s prepared and crafted discourse. Putin can speak English, but he did not deign even to utter a few pleasantries in that language—while speaking on American soil. (He could have said, but didn’t: “I am grateful to the president and the people of the United States”²). Instead he plowed straight ahead, all in Russian. He “framed” the Ukraine issue entirely on Russian terms, starting with its “root causes,” which boil down to his familiar argument that Russia deserves to control Ukraine.

Putin’s last fillip, inviting Trump to have their next meeting in Moscow—seemingly unscripted and delivered in English, so everyone would understand it—clearly caught Trump off guard. With this minor bit of event-planning—who talks when—Putin took a step ahead of Trump’s team, and a thousand steps ahead of Trump himself.

I don’t think I’ve used this word previously in writing. But if I used the vocabulary of a MAGA-style person, I would say that Trump was cucked.

Categories Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson on the Putin-Trump Summit

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2025 //
19

Trump has been threatening to impose severe sanctions of Russia unless Putin agreed to a ceasefire. First, Trump set a deadline of 50 days, then changed the deadline to 10-12 days. No one takes his deadlines seriously because he frequently fails to enforce his threats or forgets them. When he met with Putin last Friday, Trump called the meeting a summit, although he apparently had no demands, no agenda.

Putin got what he wanted: a private visit with Trump on American soil. Respect. Being treated as an equal to the U.S.

Trump did not get the ceasefire he wanted. Or claimed to want. He left the meeting echoing Putin’s agenda: Ukraine must give up Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014, and Ukraine must agreee never to join NATO.

The optics of the meeting were to Putin’s benefit. Trump had American military roll out a red carpet for Putin. Trump got out of Air Fotce One, walked unsteadily down his red carpet, and waited for Putin. The video of Trump walking in a zigzag pattern, unable apparently to walk a straight line, echoed across social media. Then, as he waited for Putin, he clapped for him, repeatedly. Can you imagine Reagan applauding his Soviet counterpart on the tarmac, or any other American President?. His displays of deference towards Putin were passing strange.

Heather Cox Richardson provided an overview:

Yesterday, military personnel from the United States of America literally rolled out a red carpet for a dictator who invaded a sovereign country and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including the stealing of children. Apparently coached by his team, Trump stood to let Russia’s president Vladimir Putin walk toward him after Putin arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, putting Trump in a dominant position, but he clapped as Putin walked toward him. The two men greeted each other warmly.

This summit between the president of the United States and the president of Russia came together fast, in the midst of the outcry in the U.S. over Trump’s inclusion in the Epstein files and the administration’s refusal to release those files.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.

Quickly, though, it became clear that Witkoff’s description of Putin’s offer was wrong, either because Putin had misled him or because he had misunderstood: Witkoff does not speak Russian and, according to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, does not use a notetaker from the U.S. embassy. Nonetheless, on Friday, August 8, Trump announced on social media that he would meet personally with Putin in Alaska, without Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

That the president of the United States offered a meeting to Putin on U.S. soil, ground that once belonged to Russia and that Russian nationalists fantasize about taking back, was itself a win for Putin.

As Jonathan Lemire noted yesterday in The Atlantic, in the week before the meeting, leaders in Ukraine and Europe worried that Trump would agree to Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over Crimea and most of its four eastern oblasts, a demand that Russian operatives made initially in 2016 when they offered to help Trump win the White House—the so-called Mariupol Plan—and then pressure Ukraine to accept the deal.

In the end, that did not happen. The summit appears to have produced nothing but a favorable photo op for Putin.

That is no small thing, for Russia, which is weak and struggling, managed to break the political isolation it’s lived in since invading Ukraine again in 2022. Further, the choreography of the summit suggested that Russia is equal to the United States. But those important optics were less than Russia wanted.

It appeared that Russia was trying to set the scene for a major powers summit of the past, one in which the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union, were the dominant players, with the USSR dominating the U.S. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov showed up to Alaska in a sweatshirt with the Russian initials for USSR, a sign that Russia intends to absorb Ukraine as well as other former Soviet republics and recreate itself as a dominant world power.

As Lemire notes, Putin indicated he was interested in broadening the conversation to reach beyond Ukraine into economic relations between the two countries, including a discussion of the Arctic, and a nuclear arms agreement. The U.S. seemed to be following suit. It sent a high-ranking delegation that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Witkoff, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Exactly what the White House expected from the summit was unclear. Trump warned that if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire there would be “very severe consequences,” but the White House also had seemed to be walking back any expectations of a deal at the summit, downgrading the meeting to a “listening exercise.”

After Trump and Putin met on the tarmac, Trump ushered the Russian president to the presidential limousine, known as The Beast, giving them time to speak privately despite the apparent efforts of the U.S. delegation to keep that from happening. When the summit began, Rubio and Witkoff joined Trump to make up the U.S. delegation, while Putin, his longtime foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, and Lavrov made up the Russian delegation. The principals emerged after a three-hour meeting with little to say.

At the news conference after their meeting, Putin took the podium first—an odd development, since he was on U.S. soil—and spoke for about eight minutes. Then Trump spoke for three minutes, telling reporters the parties had not agreed to a ceasefire but that he and Putin had made “great progress” in their talks. Both men appeared subdued. They declined to take reporters’ questions.

A Fox News Channel reporter said: “The way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president, then left.” But while Putin got his photo op, he did not get the larger superpower dialogue he evidently wanted. Neither did he get the open support of the United States to end the war on his terms, something he needs as his war against Ukraine drags on.

The two and a half hour working lunch that was scheduled did not take place. Both men left Alaska within an hour.

Speaking with European leaders in a phone call from Air Force One on his way home from the summit, Trump said that Putin rejected the idea of a ceasefire and insisted that Ukraine cede territory to Russia. He also suggested that a coalition of the willing, including the U.S., would be required to provide security guarantees to Ukraine. But within hours, Trump had dropped his demand for a ceasefire and instead echoed Putin’s position that negotiations for a peace agreement should begin without one.

In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity after the meeting, Trump said he would not impose further sanctions on Russia because the meeting with Putin had gone “very well.” “Because of what happened today, I think I don’t have to think about that now,” Trump told Hannity. “I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don’t have to think about that right now.”

Trump also suggested he was backing away from trying to end the war and instead dumping the burden on Ukraine’s president. He told Hannity that “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”

Today Chiara Eisner of NPR reported that officials from the Trump administration left eight pages of information produced by the U.S. State Department in a public printer at the business center of an Alaskan hotel. The pages revealed potentially sensitive information about the August 15 meetings, including the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members and thirteen U.S. and Russian state leaders.

The pages also contained the information that Trump intended to give Putin an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue,” and the menu for the cancelled lunch, which specified that the luncheon was “in honor of his excellency, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”

Putin got what he wanted. He didn’t hang around for lunch. He left.

Trump meets today with Ukrainian President Zelensky and European leaders, who are united against Russian aggression.

Categories Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Fascism, International

Richard Haass: Trump Has Already Rewarded Putin

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2025 //
17

Richard Haass, who was chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations for 20 years, is a seasoned diplomat. Since he now speaks for himself, not an organization, he lays out his concerns about the trap that Trump has set for himself when he meets with Putin in Alaska. Putin is not allowed to travel in Europe, where he has been declared a war criminal, both for his invasion of Ukraine and for the systematic kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children.

Haass writes:

The big story this week is the highly anticipated meeting… between Presidents Trump and Putin in Alaska. That Friday’s meeting is taking place on U.S. soil is in itself a big win for Vladimir Putin, who has not set foot in this country since 2007. The invitation undermines international efforts to isolate him on account of Russian aggression and war crimes in Ukraine. That this meeting is with him alone and does not include Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is also to Putin’s advantage. As they say, you’re either at the table or you’re on it.

The run-up to the meeting has been less than reassuring. The president and his envoy-to-everywhere Steve Witkoff have been talking about land swaps. There are several problems with them. Any swap that gives Russia anything rewards it for aggression. Second, land swaps might leave Ukraine worse off militarily if Putin (as is likely) treats any ceasefire as a pause rather than a prelude to a lasting treaty. This risk grows exponentially if swaps are not tied to meaningful security assurances to Ukraine. More generally, territory is the sort of issue that should be held in reserve for final status talks associated with a permanent peace. They are contentious and may be needed to craft a larger package. The focus now should be on bringing about a ceasefire, the simpler the better.

The vice president didn’t help matters by declaring that “We’re done with funding the Ukraine war business.” Only by continuing to do so is there an actual chance that Putin will conclude (however reluctantly) that more war will not deliver more of what he wants. Other pressure could come from imposing new sanctions on Russia and announcing U.S. support for giving Ukraine access to the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets. It is unclear whether the administration will exercise these options. I have my doubts.

My nightmare scenario as we approach Alaska is that President Trump and his envoy, who appear to be conducting diplomacy unencumbered by much in the way of either expertise or experts, will largely side with the Russian president, present a joint proposal to the Ukrainian president, and, when said proposal is rejected as it invariably would be, Trump will blame Zelenskyy for bursting his diplomatic bubble and cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine in response.

As much as I would like to see real progress toward a fair ceasefire and the United States doing all in its power to stand against territorial acquisition by force, I would think the best outcome at Alaska is no agreement, with Trump having learned (again) that his good friend Vlad places a higher priority on undermining Ukraine’s standing as an independent sovereign country than winning hearts and minds in this White House. It is thus somewhat reassuring that the White House spokesperson is walking back expectations, now casting the meeting as a “listening exercise.” If so, the president will have escaped from a trap of his own making, which would be a good thing. No deal is better than a bad one.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, International, Lies, Stupid, Trump

Timothy Snyder: When Donald Meets Vlad

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2025 //
5

Trump and Putin are meeting Friday in Alaska to discuss Ukraine. Ukrainian leader Zelensky was not invited, nor were any representatives of Europe. Trump will hear Putin’s grievances and claims. He will hear no other. After Russia intensified its drone bombing of Ukrainian civilian targets, Trump demanded a ceasefire. Putin ignored him. He gave his a deadline of 50 days (!) to stop the attacks. Putin intensified the attacks. Then Trump said the deadline was 10-12 days. That was two weeks ago. Putin got a face-to-face meeting with Trump on American soil, and his war against Ukraine goes on.

Timothy Snyder is one of the nation’s pre-eminent historians of Europe. He taught at Yale University for many years, but decided to accept an offer to teach at the University of Toronto after Trump was re-elected in 2024. He is the author of many books, including the national bestseller On Tyranny.

Snyder writes:

In the ancient world, people spoke of “Ultima Thule,” a mythical land in the extreme north, the end of the earth.

By venturing north to Alaska to meet Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump reaches his own Ultima Thula, the arctic endpoint of a foreign policy dreamworld.

The premise of Trump’s foreign relations is that foreign leaders can be dealt with like Americans, with fantastic promises and obnoxious bullying.

The fantasies do not function beyond America’s borders. The empty offer of a “beautiful” future does move dictators who commit crimes for their own visions, or affect people who are defending their families from a criminal invasion.

Ukraine has been resisting Russia’s full-scale invasion for three and a half years. Ukrainians fight because Russians invade their land, steal their wealth, kidnap their children and raise them as Russians, torture civilians in basements, murder people with any sort of association with politics or civil society, and destroy their sovereignty.

Putin, for that matter, has his own vision of a beautiful future, and no reason to prefer Trump’s to his own. Putin’s utopia is one of a Ukraine with no government, with a population cowed by torture, with children stolen and brainwashed, with patriots murdered and buried in mass graves, with resources in Russian hands.

Like Trump’s fantasizing, Trump’s bullying also does not work abroad. To be sure, many Americans are afraid of Trump. He has purged his own political party through stochastic violence. He is deploying the US military as a police force, first in California and then in Washington DC.

But foreign enemies apprehend these intimidation tactics differently. In Moscow, deployments of soldiers inside the United States look like weakness. Trump is signalling that he sees the task of the US military as to oppress unarmed Americans. The very move that shocks Americans delights America’s foes.

The tough talk may resonate in America, where we confuse words with actions. But for Russian leaders it covers a weak foreign policy. Trump has made extraordinary concessions to Russia in exchange for nothing at all. Russia has repaid him by continuing the war and seeking to win it — and by laughing at Trump on state-controlled television.

What are those concessions? Just by meeting Putin in Alaska, Trump gives the Russian dictator a chance to spread his own story of his invasion of Ukraine, both to the Americans around Trump and to the American press. By shaking hands with an indicted war criminal, Trump signals that the killings, the tortures, the kidnapings do not matter. 

Even the choice of Alaska is a concession, and an odd one. Russians, including major figures in state media, routinely claim Alaska for Russia. As one of Putin’s special envoys put it, Putin’s journey to Alaska is a “domestic flight.”

Inviting people who claim your territory inside your main military base on that territory to discuss a war of aggression they started without any participation of the country they invaded — well, that is just about as far as a certain logic of fantasy can go. It is Ultima Thule.

It is Ultima Thule, the very end, because Trump has already conceded the more fundamental issues. He does not speak of the need for justice for Russian war criminals, or of the need for Russia to pay reparations. The Trump administration grants that Russia can determine Ukraine’s and America’s foreign policy on the crucial point of NATO membership. They have accepted that Russia’s invasions should lead not only to de facto but also de jure changes in sovereign control over territory.

It would take a longer essay to explain how senseless these concessions are. Accepting that invasion can legally change borders undoes the world order. Granting Russia the right to decide the foreign policy of others encourages further aggression by Russia. Dropping the obvious legal and historical responses to criminal wars of aggression — reparations and trials — encourages war in general.

Trump speaks loudly and carries a small stick. The notion that words alone can do the trick has led Trump to the position that Putin’s words matter, and so he must go to Alaska for a “listening exercise.” Trump’s career has been full of listening to Putin, and then repeating what Putin says.

Trump and Putin are moved by the future perception of their greatness. Putin believes that this can be achieved by war, and an element of this war is the manipulation of the American president. Trump believes that this can achieved by being associated with peace, which, so long as he is unwilling to make policy himself, puts him in the power of the warmaker.

northern lights

Putin is not moved to end the war when his own propaganda is repeated by the president of the United States. He cannot be enticed by a vague vision of a better world, since he has in mind his own very specific atrocity.

In Alaska, Trump reaches his personal Ultima Thula, the limits of his own personal world of magical talk. 

He faces a very simple issue: will Putin accept an unconditional ceasefire or not.

Putin has refused any such thing. The Russians propose an obviously ridiculous and provocative counter: that Ukraine should now formally concede to Russia territory that Russia does not even occupy, lands on which Ukraine has built its defenses. And then Russia can of course attack again, from a far better position. 

Putin knows that Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize. And so Putin’s obvious move is to suggest to Trump that war will end someday, and Trump will get the credit, if the two of them just keep talking (and while Russia keeps bombing).

If Trump leaves Alaska without Putin having agreed to an unconditional ceasefire, there are two paths that Trump can take. He can continue the fantasy, though it will become ever more obvious, even to his friends and supporters, that the fantasy is Putin’s.

Or Trump can make the policy that will make the war harder for Putin, and thereby bring its end closer.

The United States has not formalized its outlandish concessions to Russia, and could take them back in one press conference. The United States has the policy instruments to change the direction of the war in Ukraine, and could employ them.

Trump has threatened “serious consequences” if Putin does not accept an unconditional ceasefire. Those are words, and thus far the consequences of Trump’s words, for Russia, have been more words. This all becomes clear now, at Ultima Thule, clear to everyone. 

When Trump reaches the border of his fantasy world, what is his next step? Where will he go after Ultima Thule?

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Ignorance, International, Lies, Stupid, Trump, Tyranny
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