Bad day offers lessons for Trump
The Trump/Putin summit and subsequent press conference in Helsinki, Finland, Monday has resulted in a Category 4 storm of news and analysis declaring it a watershed moment marking the beginning of the decline of the republic.
We have come to expect such a reaction for just about anything President Trump does.
This time was different. The president had perhaps the worst day of his term. Many suggest that his address to the media after the Charlottesville clashes was worse as he seemed to assign blame to “both sides.” However, in that situation he repeatedly condemned racism and racists. In Helsinki, Trump never laid a hand on Vladimir Putin, although he was given plenty of opportunities.
His rhetoric was consistently conciliatory. He deflected again and again when it came to addressing Russian meddling with the 2016 election, and instead defended the legitimacy of his election victory. The president did not have his A-game, or his Bgame for that matter. He had his F-game.
He seemed lethargic at times, and his replies were more stilted and fragmented than ever.
President Putin was calm and confident while the American president gave the impression that he was subordinate to his Russian counterpart. Not only was Trump in no mood for confrontation, at times he seemed happy to align himself more closely to Putin than to our own intelligence services. Asked about Russian meddling, President Trump remarked, “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
With Trump so readily relinquishing the high ground to Putin on a matter of national security, we wonder why exactly a summit was held in the first place. If there was any progress made on the matters of Syria or the Crimea, it was not trumpeted in the joint press conference. Our president spent more time swatting at collusion allegations, denigrating the press or reliving his 2016 presidential campaign.
Monday was a bad day for the president. It’s not the end of the world and certainly not the end of his presidency. A bad day can be offset with a good day.
A good day would look like something that Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush, tweeted: “If only: If POTUS yesterday had said ‘We and Russia can get along. On Iran, Syria, and non-proliferation, there is a lot we can do together. But when it comes to America’s elections, I have a three word message. Vladimir — knock it off.’ Think how well Trump would be doing today.”
The entire administration should learn from this. If the theme of the summit was that due to the two leaders’ long and thoughtful meeting, we are now further from nuclear war than before, then that needed to be articulated much, much better. After all both the Bush and Obama administrations made gestures to improve relations to achieve such ends. Instead we saw President Trump miss multiple opportunities to call Putin out for his actions but express interest in working together to solve problems that Putin created.
We can be heartened that despite his dismal showing in Helsinki, President Trump’s policies on Russia have been the right ones and far stronger than those of his predecessors. We look forward to better showings at the podium from him.