In an interview with CBS on Wednesday, Donald Trump complained that all the coverage of his meeting with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin had not been “fair.” All the networks and papers had focused on his fumbling, fawning appearance at the press conference, his inability to stand up to Putin, and “a few statements” he made throwing his own country under the bus. When it was suggested to Trump that the media had provided wall to wall, accurate coverage of everything said at the conference, his response was telling.
TRUMP: I don't care what they covered. They don't, they didn't cover my meeting. The important thing, frankly, was the meeting that lasted for two and a half hours, or almost two and a half hours. And in that meeting, we discussed many, many things that were very, very positive for both countries.
But of course there’s a reason why the press hasn’t covered the contents of the meeting. We don’t know the contents of the meeting. Trump has provided only shifting, and vague claims about what was said. The press conference was supposed to tell the world what had happened in the meeting, but it turned into a showcase of Donald Trump showing his preference for Putin over America. Which, for all anyone knows, is exactly what happened in the discussion we didn’t see. Only, as the Washington Post reports, someone is coming forward to talk about that private meeting. It’s not Trump. It’s the Russian ambassador making claims about what Trump promised his country when no one was looking.
“Important verbal agreements” were reached at the Helsinki meeting, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, told reporters in Moscow Wednesday, including preservation of the New Start and INF agreements, major bilateral arms control treaties whose futures have been in question. Antonov also said that Putin had made “specific and interesting proposals to Washington” on how the two countries could cooperate on Syria.
Preserving the arms limits under New START would seem to be a good thing, only … we don’t know if that’s true. We don’t know anything. Except that the US military should not be scrambling to discover what happened in this meeting by listing to the Russian ambassador speak in Moscow.
Following his brief Singapore mini-summit with Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump offered a limp signed agreement that was actually weaker in both goals and details than previous agreements with North Korea. But despite the fact that he came home empty handed, Trump returned from Singapore bragging about his achievements. In comparison, the post-Helsinki statements have been confined to Trump trying to make everyone forget just how utterly useless he looked in his role as Putin’s sidekick. Why is the American public learning about what Trump and Putin discussed, through statements from the Russian ambassador? And it’s not just the public.
Officials at the most senior levels across the U.S. military, scrambling since Monday to determine what Trump may have agreed to on national security issues in Helsinki, had little to no information Wednesday.
After Singapore, Trump promised that in private he and Kim had made “great progress” but … just didn’t have the time to get it down on paper. In the weeks since that meeting, it’s become clear that any agreement between Trump and Kim was purely illusory. North Korea has carried on improving its capacity to build both nuclear weapons and missiles, and despite Trump completely surrendering on one of America’s most important points, by giving up joint preparedness exercises with South Korea, the North has given him … nothing.
The relative silence about Helsinki could mean that Trump was just as ineffectual in getting anything from Putin but … was he also as generous in giving up important factors in America’s defense? Is Trump embarrassed that he signed onto New START even though it was negotiated and signed by President Obama? What’s the “interesting” agreement on Syria? And is Trump just going to let Russia be the standard means of distributing his foreign policy information from now on?
Current and former officials said it’s not unusual for it to take at least several days for aides to finalize and distribute internal memos documenting high-level conversations. Adding to the delay in the case of Trump’s Russia summit is the fact that the president’s longest encounter with Putin, a two hour-plus session, included no other officials or note-takers, just interpreters.
Oddly enough, the Russians seem to have written a few things down. Or at least, they’re claiming to have made agreements—just as Trump claimed to make agreements with Kim Jong Un.
Maybe the Secretary of Defense can clear all this up.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did not attend Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting with Trump and has not appeared in public this week or commented on the summit.
Or maybe not.
