Trump Is Astonishingly Deluded About Putin

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Shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, President Jimmy Carter said, in a TV interview, that the assault “made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time that I’ve been in office.”

Carter’s critics chortled at his belatedly acknowledged naïveté, but at least he admitted that he’d been wrong and took corrective actions—ending economic assistance to the USSR, suspending nuclear arms control talks, withdrawing his ambassador, pulling out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, stiffening defenses in southern Asia, and arming anti-Soviet insurgents (a move that had woeful consequences later on, but that’s another story).

Our current president, Donald Trump, has admitted that he’d overestimated his ability to end the Russia–Ukraine war and expressed puzzlement over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities. But he hasn’t done much about it, and his view of Putin’s character and goals—which has always been, to say the least, rosy—hasn’t changed one whit.

In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week, Trump said that of all the wars going on in the world, he had thought the one in Ukraine “would be the easiest” to end, yet it’s turned out to be “the most difficult.”

His friendly interlocutor did not ask, “Why is that, do you think?” Too bad. It might have been interesting to hear Trump’s answer. I somehow doubt he would have hit upon the main explanations: that international politics are more complicated than New York real-estate deals—and that he’s been misjudging who Putin really is all along.

Late last May, after Russian forces unleashed their deadliest missile attacks against Ukrainian cities (up to that point in the war), Trump posted on social media, “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He’s needlessly killing a lot of people … for no reason.”

It didn’t occur to Trump for a moment that maybe his relationship with the Russian dictator was a sham, or that nothing had happened to Putin (rather, he has always been a vicious murderer), or that “killing a lot of people” is the point of Putin’s war (because he believes that Ukraine is a fiction and thus Ukrainian people should be wiped out).

Despite his outrage, and amid an escalation of Russian missile strikes, Trump last week rolled out the red carpet for Putin at a U.S. military base in Alaska, handed him a lavish ceremonial gift, and let him speak first (and volubly) at a postsummit press conference—in short, treated him not as a tyrant who had “gone absolutely CRAZY” but as an eminent world leader.

Trump had come to Alaska saying that Putin would face “consequences” if he didn’t agree to a ceasefire. Yet the meeting broke up—earlier than expected, before a planned lunch could be served—with neither a ceasefire nor consequences. In fact, Trump and Co. pronounced the session a success, claiming that Putin had agreed to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and that progress had been made toward a peace settlement that included land swaps and Western security assurances for Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s top officials denied all of it. Putin would not meet with Zelensky (he has hardly ever uttered the Ukrainian president’s name and regards him as an illegitimate leader), would not allow any NATO members to station any troops in Ukraine, would insist on holding veto power over any security assurances, and would not agree to any peace unless it addressed the war’s “root causes”—which, to Putin, means Ukraine’s claim to be an independent sovereign nation.

It’s unclear how or why Trump and his team described Russia’s position so inaccurately. Were they simply lying? (If so, to what end?) Had Trump’s inexperienced emissary, fellow real-estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, misunderstood Putin in their preliminary discussions? (This does seem to have been part of the problem.) Did they think that publicly exaggerating the progress might force Putin into the awkward choice of acceding to the U.S. position or looking bad to the rest of the world? (If so, they don’t realize that Putin doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks.)

Certainly Putin needn’t care about the threats and admonitions of an American president who so consistently steps back from following through.

Meanwhile, even those who want to see Trump succeed must be wondering just what his policy is toward this war. He has warmed up to Zelensky (thanks largely to European leaders who coached the Ukrainian president on how to dress in the White House and how to kiss its occupant’s ring). He let a group of European leaders attend his talk with Zelensky and even, at least for the moment, accepted their insistence on some form of security guarantees as part of any peace deal, and agreed in the meantime to keep arming Ukrainian forces.

And yet, he hasn’t taken any actions to pressure Putin directly. He allowed Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby to tell European allies after the summit that the U.S. would play at most a minimal role in any security guarantees—or at least didn’t dispute admonish Colby (who has advocated for scaling back our security commitment to Europe generally).

Nor, crucially, has he snapped out of his dreamy idolatry toward one of the world’s cruelest dictators. “I think he respects our country now,” Trump said of Putin in a postsummit interview, adding, “He didn’t respect it under Biden, I can tell you that. He had no respect for it.”

There are two astonishing things about this statement: first, that he thinks Putin’s respect is something worth bragging about; second, that he really thinks Putin respects him, when it’s clear as day that Putin is playing him like a proverbial fiddle.

In the same interview, Trump pronounced himself as “so happy” that Putin shared his belief, during their joint press conference, that the Russia–Ukraine war would not have happened if Trump had been president. But a close reading of the transcript of that press conference reveals why Putin believes this. It’s because, he said, Biden did not accede to Russia’s demands—which were that Ukraine disarm and that the Kyiv government step down. Putin thinks Trump would have accepted those demands, or at least wouldn’t have helped Ukraine resist them, and that therefore a war would not have been necessary.

In this sense, Donald Trump is naïve in a way that Jimmy Carter never was.

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