For reasons that still escape me, news media pundits have been analyzing (in my view foolishly in real time) the Putin–Trump summit. It is a pointless exercise for several reasons.
Historically, summits are the culmination of painstaking preparation by lower-level staffers working through most issues in advance. The leaders then arrive to finalize details and present an apparent breakthrough to their domestic audiences. A great summit is one in which substantive progress is achieved; a good summit is one in which there are no surprises. In Alaska, the meeting was neither: the surprise was the United States appearing to back down and accept Putin’s position. Yet in another sense the outcome was entirely predictable. President Trump has always rejected this model of diplomacy, insisting that his unrivaled personal negotiating skills could secure any outcome he wanted at the table. Experience from his first term, most notably the failure of his direct diplomacy with North Korea, demonstrated the fallacy of that approach.
Let's be clear: the Alaska summit was never intended to produce a settlement of the war in Ukraine. Its principal purpose was domestic. Trump needed something to distract media attention from the damaging Epstein files controversy.
More than two hundred days after loudly proclaiming he would end the war in Ukraine on his first day in office, the summit did nothing to bring peace any closer. But there were unexpected gains--for Russia. Trump backed away from his call for a ceasefire, muted his threats of further sanctions, and effectively accepted the military status quo. In return he received little more than flattery from Vladimir Putin, who has long understood that the currency Trump values most is personal adulation. More broadly, the summit served to restore Russia’s diplomatic standing, allowing Putin to appear once again as a legitimate player on the international stage.
The Alaska summit reaffirmed what has been evident since his descent on the gilded escalator over a decade ago: Trump treats governing as theater, subordinating policy to spectacle and the national interest to his own need for attention and profit. Yet nine years after Trump first entered the White House, the broadcast media still has not figured out how to cover him. Analysts continue to treat his appearances as though they were good-faith attempts at governance when in fact they are performances of often unintelligible babble, interspersed with "alternative facts" masquerading as policy. At least on The Apprentice his performances were loosely anchored in a domain where he had some experience. In office, they rest only on his fantasies of what strong leaders do.
Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 book "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" warned us that "the medium is the message", The folly lies not only in Trump’s theatrics, but in the media’s pointless attempts to interpret them as though substance mattered; with Donald Trump, it has always been about the performance.
