There was no one in the world Donald Trump wanted more as a bestie than Vladimir Putin. In 2013, Trump mused about Putin becoming his "new best friend" and on the campaign trail he famously praised Putin's leadership abilities on the way to trashing President Obama’s.
But now that he's president, Trump's personal desire to befriend Puti has slowly turned to dust as Putin has proven over and over again that he's, quite simply, a shitty world actor. Between Putin's hacking of our 2016 elections, his backing of the murderous Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, and the poisoning of a former Russian spy in England using a Soviet-produced nerve agent, Trump hasn't been able to properly fête Putin in the way he always dreamed of. And that has made Trump a very angry boy.
Take this scene after his administration expelled some 60 Russian diplomats in concert with U.S. allies in response to the nerve agent poisoning. The Washington Post writes:
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials — far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on. [...]
His briefers tried to reassure him that the sum total of European expulsions was roughly the same as the U.S. number.
“I don’t care about the total!” the administration official recalled Trump screaming. [...] Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the expulsions. “There were curse words,” the official said, “a lot of curse words.”
That went well. Don't bother Trump with nuance or facts, guys, especially if Fox News is saying something different.
That whole scene gives us some vivid insight into Monday's news that Trump is putting the brakes on new sanctions that were due to be announced by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The Kremlin had “swiftly denounced” the new round of sanctions as “'international economic raiding,'” according to the Post.
Although the Trump administration has sanctioned Russian oligarchs, proceeded with mass expulsions, and just last weekend launched a missile strike against Putin’s ally in Syria, Trump has repeatedly sought to tamp down coverage of any anti-Russian moves, sometimes instructing his staff not to talk of them at all.
Naturally, Trump never even considered that something outside of his own personal desires could affect U.S. foreign policy.
Trump came to the White House believing that his personal relationships with other leaders would be central to solving the world’s thorniest foreign policy problems, administration officials said. In Trump’s mind, no leader was more important or powerful than Putin, they said.
Let’s not forget that Putin was also the single most important player in Trump's decades-long bid to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. His ambition to forge a personal relationship with Putin also helped fuel Trump’s disdain for the special counsel's Russia investigation.
Privately, he complained to aides that the media’s fixation on the Mueller probe was hobbling his effort to woo Putin. “I can’t put on the charm,” the president often said, according to one of his advisers. “I’m not able to be president because of this witch hunt.”
So sad for Trump. Some relationships just aren't meant to be and, if he can’t have Putin, then his entire presidency is apparently lost.