Trump at odds with his advisers over Russia

Donald Trump may be president, said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post, but is he even in charge of this government? Two weeks ago, he invited Vladimir Putin to visit the White House. The visit has now been shelved. Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was having to tell the Senate Foreign Relations committee, that, no, it wasn’t the case – as Russian officials are hinting it was – that in Trump’s Helsinki meeting with Putin, the president had verbally agreed to drop sanctions against Russia. Nor had he agreed that a referendum to determine their political future should be held in the breakaway republics in Ukraine held by Russian-backed separatists. Almost every policy stance Trump takes seems to be reversed by his own administration. Trump expresses doubt about Russian election interference: the FBI director and the director of national intelligence publicly contradict him.

What a way to run foreign policy, said USA Today. The worst of it is the total lack of transparency. At Helsinki, during the 120 minutes Trump talked to Putin, the only people present were the translators. Result? “Russians have been spinning the dickens out of the event,” while Americans beg for answers from their government. Helsinki was an embarrassment, said Leonid Bershidsky on Bloomberg. Trump has such scant support in his administration and Congress for his Russia détente, that any oral agreements he may have made are meaningless. He’s now having to admit that nothing happened at the summit while simultaneously insisting it was a great success.

What we’re witnessing, said Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker, is nothing less “than the breakdown of American foreign policy”. Trump’s foreign policy team is at odds with him on everything from Syria to Russia to North Korea. He rushes in with a wrecking ball (like his tweet threatening Iran with consequences “WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE”) and his officials have to clean up after him. It was his national security adviser, John Bolton, who nixed the proposal of Putin visiting the White House, blaming the “witch hunt” in Washington over Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow. Actually, it was Putin who resisted a second meeting after Helsinki, said Ed Kilgore on Nymag.com. He knew it would inflame suspicions that he had something on the US president and create a deeper anti-russia backlash. The truth is that the Russian understands American politics better than Trump does. They “feel so fortunate about their big propaganda win at the Helsinki summit, they don’t want to jinx themselves by returning to that well so soon”.