Not to worry, America, while Donald Trump's communications team is busy airing every petty grievance of our man-child in chief, we're back to getting a steady flow of information from America’s most trusted name in news: The Kremlin.
That's right—after the highly anticipated first meeting between the Don and his best bro Vlad, it was the Kremlin that first blasted out the news of palm finally meeting palm in the handshake seen ‘round the world. Here's the AP's initial account Friday morning:
The Kremlin says that President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump have exchanged a handshake and a few words ahead of their sit-down at the G-20 summit.
Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin and Trump “shook hands and told each other that they will shortly have a separate meeting.”
Following up on that inaugural fail, Trump's crackerjack press shop let Russia take the lead on tweeting the first photo, releasing a pic of Trump practically groveling to shake Putin’s hand:
But wait, there’s more! RT delivered the world’s first account of what was discussed:
(Note: As of 1:30 PM ET still no tweets from @realDonaldTrump or @PressSec or @WhiteHouse. The White House press shop was apparently too busy delivering an off-camera account to U.S. pool reporters.)
Yep, Trump’s comms team got beat to the punch on the global stage not once, not twice, but three times on Friday. Heck of a job, there, Spicey.
Takes you back, doesn't it? Ahh, such fond memories of the Sergey sandwich photos the Kremlin served up from inside the Oval Office through its state-owned Russian media outlet TASS.
Who needs a White House photographer when Russia can just handle it—amiright?
Which reminds me of all this hubbub about who would get the upper hand in Friday's Trump-Putin meeting. The U.S. media were joking, right? Forget about the fact that Putin, a former KGB officer, actually specializes in intelligence while the Don has a voracious appetite for colorful pictures and "tweet-length" summaries—Trump's White House got entirely played by the Russians on our home turf during that May meeting, right in the Oval Office, for god’s sake.
“We were not informed by the Russians that their official photographer was dual-hatted and would be releasing the photographs on the state news agency,” the administration official said.
As a result, White House officials said they were surprised to see photos posted online showing Trump not only with Lavrov but also smiling and shaking hands with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Oh, and since that initial Oval Office meeting has already proven predictive, let's remember that Trump fumbled highly sensitive Israeli intelligence to the Russians in that exchange. It should have been a foregone conclusion that Putin would squeeze something juicy from Trump's slush brain, but who knows if we’ll ever find out about it since the only six people in the room—Putin, Trump, their foreign diplomats Sergey Lavrov and Rex Tillerson, and two translators—didn’t include a stenographer.
Unless, of course, the Kremlin wants us to know.