"There's No Stopping Him": Trump Insists on a Putin Summit
Source: The New Yorker
After Singapore, the President is pressing ahead with the meeting that he’s always wanted.
By Susan B. Glasser5:00 A.M.
Fresh off his closely watched Singapore summit with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, President Trump is pushing his team to arrange another dramatic one-on-one meeting, this time with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, as soon as this summer. Negotiations with the Kremlin have been under way for weeks. “There’s no stopping him,” a senior Administration official familiar with the internal deliberations said. “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.”
Ever since Putin’s reëlection to another six-year term in March, Trump has been pressing for a Putin summit, dismissing advisers’ warnings about the political dangers of such a meeting, given the ongoing special counsel investigation into whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia as it interfered in the 2016 U.S. election on Trump’s behalf. With the Russia allegations swirling, Trump never had the formal meeting he wanted with Putin last year—settling for just two brief encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings—but he has clearly never given up on his campaign vision of closer ties with the Russian strongman, whose autocratic rule he has often praised. The North Korea summit this week, which Trump jubilantly declared a “historic” encounter that will lead to the end of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, has likely sealed the deal for an equally high-profile Putin meeting. Now Russia experts inside and outside the U.S. government are bracing themselves for a formal announcement of the summit, which is likely to happen as early as July, when Trump will be in Europe for the annual meeting of the nato alliance that Putin considers his country’s mortal enemy.
Negotiations began in earnest, the senior Administration official told me, after Trump disregarded his aides’ “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” warning in his post-election phone call with Putin, in March. During the conversation, Trump both congratulated the Russian leader on his election—which Western election observers said had failed to offer voters a real choice—and issued Putin an invitation to the White House. After the call, the Kremlin quickly released word of the invite and began publicly lobbying to pin down a date for a summit, but, privately, the Russian President balked at the Oval Office as the meeting’s venue. “Putin doesn’t want to come to Washington. Putin wants to meet in a third-party location,” the senior Administration official told me. “Originally, Trump didn’t want to do that,” but the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Putin asked Austria’s new hard-right populist Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, to arrange the summit for Vienna, and the White House is considering the proposal. Two former senior U.S. officials told me that they had also been briefed on Trump’s orders to his staff to plan for the Putin summit soon. One of them said it could even occur on the first leg of Trump’s trip to Europe next month, before Trump attends the annual nato meeting. Getting together with Putin before the allies would be “breaking every rule we’ve ever had,” the former U.S. official said, a flagrant breach of protocol sure to upset Europeans already jittery over Trump’s criticism of the nato alliance and his public embrace of Putin.
A Russia summit would seem to be a perfect next act for a President who has embraced personal diplomacy with American adversaries as the signature of his foreign policy. Trump’s pursuit of a one-on-one with Putin mirrors his spur-of-the-moment decision to meet with the North Korean leader: a major policy move carried out in spite of his advisers, not because of them, and with little genuine support from either Republicans or Democrats. A Putin meeting, though, would be far more politically explosive than this week’s Singapore summit, given the President’s intensifying campaign to discredit or block the special counsel’s investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia as the country worked to help elect him.
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/theres-no-stopping-him-trump-insists-on-a-russia-summit
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trump, Putin, Kim. Same, same.
fuck trump
