Arctic Buffoonery: Trump’s Treasonous Waltz with the Butcher of the Kremlin
We may not know why or how, but Putin has always owned Trump, that much is clear
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By David Shuster
In the August ruggedness of Anchorage Alaska, where the sun barely sets and the walruses belch in despair, Donald Trump is now planning to stage a summit so stupid, so supine, and so staggeringly servile that even the ghosts of Neville Chamberlain and Vidkun Quisling are blushing.
The Don has declared that Vladimir Putin — murderer, marauder, and czarist thug — deserves a personal audience with the President of the United States.
Yet, who has not been invited to this geopolitical circle jerk?
Why Volodymyr Zelensky, of course, the elected leader of the sovereign nation of Ukraine. The very country Putin seeks to pulverize, or at least use Trump as cover to carve up at this sit down of the sociopaths.
This is not diplomacy. It is not even buffoonery. It is straight up betrayal.
The idea that Trump would cradle the bloodstained hands of Putin and call it “peace” is no longer surprising, just repulsive. Trump’s admiration for tyrants is as compulsive as his aversion to reading.
Trump describes Putin as a “man of strength,” as though the strength to bomb hospitals, kidnap children, and send your own troops into a meat grinder were qualities to be admired in a leader.
To Trump, morality is a nuisance, history is a fog, and truth is an inconvenience, at best. So, he cavorts with war criminals while smearing U.S. allies in Europe (and beyond) as freeloaders and fools.
The planned Alaska summit is a diplomatic gang bang with the corpse of Ukrainian independence left twitching on the ground. It is pure evil.
A meeting about peace that excludes Ukraine is as rational as a trial without a victim or a wedding without a bride.
The fact that Trump dares to float such a farce proves once and for all that Old Man Orange is not merely ignorant. He—like all who worship at the altar of this cretin—is utterly incapable of even the slightest modicum of decency.
Of course, this is the same flask of flaccidity who once stood on foreign soil and groveled before Putin like a mongrel before a butcher, mumbling that he – Trump - saw no reason to doubt Russia over U.S. intelligence services.
That disgrace in Helsinki was a preview; this latest charade is the encore, with all the pomp of treason and none of the subtlety.
And let’s not overlook the symbolism of Alaska—a territory America once bought from the Russian tsars, now offered back to their spiritual heir as a neutral ground for “peace.”
One can almost hear the vodka-soaked cheers from the Kremlin, whose propaganda machine surely erupts in orgasmic glee at the prospect of an American president legitimizing their Ukrainian conquest with a handshake and a photo op.
The only thing missing will be a commemorative coin struck with Trump’s face on one side and Putin’s smirk on the other, inscribed with the motto: In Thugs We Trust.
To the GOP enablers who still call themselves patriots while clapping like trained seals at Trump’s every depravity, remember this. What Trump is proposing is not peace—it is appeasement.
This is the betrayal of a fledgling Ukrainian democracy for the amusement and pride of a petulant Putin. And for the ego of demented huckster Trump, who mistakes flattery for statecraft and cowardice for cunning.
Zelensky, whose citizens have buried children shredded by Russian shrapnel, is now being asked to sit in silence while Trump and Putin “work things out.” It is as though a man’s house has been set aflame, and the arsonist is invited to dinner with the fire marshal—minus the victim, who is told to wait outside.
What’s next? A summit on sexual consent between Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein? A pastor who still blames Jews for Jesus’ death at the White House?..Oh, right, did that one.
This is not leadership. It is not diplomacy. It is theater of the grotesque, starring a deranged narcissist who still believes the world is his boardroom and democracy is a nuisance to be negotiated away.
The rightful name of this is the Trump-Putin Pact, a coalition of delusion and domination, brokered not in the name of peace, but in the service of Trump’s diseased vanity.
Trump’s Alaska Gambit is not the bold stroke of a dealmaker. It is the craven act of a showman desperate for relevance, indifferent to democracy, and openly contemptuous of Ukrainian sovereignty.
An American state being used as a stage for this betrayal is nothing short of a disgrace.
David Shuster is an Emmy award winning broadcast journalist who is best known for his work at NBC News and as an anchor MSNBC. He is a contributor to Blue Amp Substack and co-host of our weekly show (Thursdays, 2pm et, on Substack), “Amped Up w/ Cliff Schecter.”
David,
You could not have said it better. To have this shameful meeting on American soil is repugnant beyond belief. This is only the latest act of treason of the utter abomination of President Trump. One can only hope that someday in the future he will face a tribunal for all of his crimes along with all of his Republican enablers.