Poodle comparisons give Trump too much credit

It didn’t take long after the Helsinki summit for European and American media publications to declare Donald Trump Vladimir Putin’s pet dog.

Britain’s Daily Mirror used “Putin’s poodle” in its next-day coverage. Other European and American outlets referred to the president as “weak” or “submissive.”

CIA Director John Brennan said on Twitter that Trump’s tail-wagging submission to Putin was “nothing short of treasonous.”

Two days before the summit, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez had pre-emptively called the president “Putin’s poodle” after a Trump tweet about the indictment of 12 Russians as part of the Mueller investigation.

In journalism, we call that a trend.

But this isn’t the first time a world leader has been characterized as a poodle, again for appearing to do another’s bidding. During the Iraq War, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair was often called President George W. Bush’s poodle. A sampling of headlines: “Was Blair Bush’s poodle?” (The Financial Times); “I’m not Bush’s poodle, insists Blair” (Daily Mail); “Ten Years Later, Still Bush’s Poodle” (The National Interest); “Bush: Blair Was No Poodle” (CBS News). You get the idea.

Not surprisingly, poodles are outraged. Surely, any fair person would concede that they deserve a voice in the matter, which I have volunteered to provide. I am a poodle person. I am not, however, a poufy-poodle person, as my unkempt Ollie would attest were he able. Poodles, which originated in Germany, not France, as often believed, were bred as duck-hunting retrievers. It was the French, however, who began the practice of turning these enthusiastic swimmers into canine topiaries.

The idea behind these poodle aspersions, apparently, is that when a world leader appears to be weak or subservient, then he or she is considered to be poodle-like. This is absurd on its face. First of all, poodles are inexplicably brave and are oblivious to scale.

Ollie, who was born blind, at least has an excuse for confusing a Doberman with a Pekinese. But even sighted poodles are ridiculously smug around grander beasts. This was certainly true for Gigi, my childhood toy poodle, who never knew fear or defeat during her 18-year stint as the luckiest dog on Earth.

On the second point, poodles are the precise opposite of subservient. Agreeable, yes. Grovelers, no. This is principally because they are more intelligent than the average American adult. They’ll “obey” to make a human feel good, but this is only a performance, an act of strategic subterfuge aimed at some higher order of self-indulgence.

Thus, to call a weak, submissive fool a poodle is misguided — and no insult to the person so designated.

They say that people often resemble the dogs they choose for themselves, though just as likely, they select dogs with the characteristics they think they also possess. Putin, for example, once bragged to Bush that his dog, a Labrador retriever, was bigger, stronger and faster than Bush’s Scottish Terrier. To be sure, this was true, but what kind of man displays his dog’s physical attributes to burnish his own masculinity and, presumably, his dominion in the dog park?

Would that insights into foreign leaders were so simple. Here’s an idea: Let’s skip World War III and just have a dog show. Trump, alas, has no dog in this fight or any other. This is because in his mind, he the dog. He’s the Big Dog. He’s got bigger buildings, better cars, boats and planes, the prettiest wife. And the world isn’t an oyster, after all, but a hydrant. How odd that he did seem to be wagging for Putin and begging for treats.

This is nothing a real poodle would do. I’ve known poodles, Mr. Trump, and, notwithstanding your topiaried poof, you’re no poodle.

She writes for the Washington Post.