TRUMP’S FORMULA

international problems, then definitely we need personal meetings,” he said in his meeting with Trump Friday.

As cameras clicked and reporters shouted questions, Putin motioned to the journalists and asked Trump, “These are the ones hurting you?”

“These are the ones. You’re right about that,” Trump said.

Putin’s reference to Trump’s war with the media was no accident, said Stephen Sestanovich, a former ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union during the Clinton administration. “I’m sure Putin finds that very simpatico.”

“Trump clearly thinks bilateral relationships serve the U.S. best in general, but there’s a separate reason for dealing with Russia one-on-one,” said Sestanovich, now a professor at Columbia University. “Putin is a semi-pariah internationally, especially now that the G-7 kicked him out three years ago. He too deals with many countries bilaterally, because Russia isn’t in all that many global clubs.”

Trump’s critics say his fostering of a Putin relationship in particular is a dangerous gambit. While Trump pressed Putin about his involvement in a campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign, Putin says Trump ended up agreeing with him that there was no such interference.

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said Sunday that Trump does believe Putin meddled in the election, and simply chose to move on to other topics.

He said the summit showed Trump “standing up for the American people.”

“I think the American people should look at that as a massive positive about this president, that you have a president that doesn’t just show up at the G-20 and sink into his chair and just suddenly agree with all of these European leaders across the table when it comes to issues that he disagrees on,” Priebus told Fox News Sunday. “The president has made it very clear that he doesn’t believe the Paris agreement is fair.”

But even as Trump rankles Europe, he seems to be focusing more attention to the Pacific Rim — where Trump is hoping to sign a series of trade deals to replace the Trans-Pacific Partnership he tore up his first week in office. Those meetings illustrate Trump’s tried and true formula for opening a bilateral meeting: emphasizing the closeness of the relationship, and then launching right into a discussion about trade:

Indonesian President Joko Widodo: “We’ve become friends, and we’re going to be doing a lot of deals together — trade deals.”

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore: “The prime minister of Singapore — we’re very close, the relationship is very close, and we expect to do some excellent things together in many ways.”

Mexican President Enrique Peña-Nieto: “It’s great to be with my friend, the president of Mexico. And we’re negotiating NAFTA and some other things with Mexico, and we’ll see how it all turns out.”

South Korean President Moon Jae-in: “We had fantastic dinner at the White House — accomplished a lot,” he said. “We are renegotiating a trade deal right now as we speak with South Korea, and hopefully it will be an equitable deal.”

Chinese President XI Jinping: “We are developing, and have developed, a wonderful relationship,” he said. “And I’m sure that whether it’s on trade or whether it’s on North Korea, or any of the many things that we will be discussing, we will come to a successful conclusion.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the talks behind closed doors were “very, very substantive.”

“These were not just relationship builders,” he said. from 2013 to 2015. That number is likely an undercount because one of his most frequent routes took at least 13 hours, meaning he wouldn’t pass through port gates enough to be flagged as working too long.

Other Morgan Southern trucks appear to have exceeded hours limits more than 500 times from 2013 to 2016, the data show. Three out of four of the company’s rigs went over hours at least once.

It is not clear whether these instances are violations because two drivers might divide time behind the wheel of a single truck.

Trucking experts and regulators say it can be a federal crime for company managers to knowingly send drivers on the road past federal limits.

Companies are responsible for tracking their workers’ hours, even if they’re classified as independent contractors, said Craig Weaver, a motor carrier safety specialist with the California Highway Patrol.

“They know how many hours their guys are working,” he said. “Or they should.”

Kelsey Frazier is a Teamster trustee and foreman at another California port trucking company, Pasha Hawaii. He said most companies have safety managers whose job is to track how long truckers have been on the road. Frazier said companies should know if drivers are over on their hours because they control when drivers are dispatched.

“I can promise you the company is tracking this,” he said. “Because you’re liable if you don’t.”