Climate changes in Anchorage for Trump

His image of a winner takes a setback when expected bold result vanishes

As a veteran showman, Donald Trump would sense when he’s losing an audience if he’s in touch with live feedback, such as performing before a studio gathering.

As I watched Trump prepare to greet Russian President Vladimir Putin on the tarmac in Anchorage on Friday, August 15, it was obvious Trump’s critics already started boiling over before he even touched fingertips for the handshake after Putin energetically approached him.

The complaints brayed that Trump was smiling! Putin was on a red carpet! As they clasped hands, Trump was acting welcoming! This is terrible!

If Trump was wearing an earpiece to be briefed live on how commentators were reacting, he wouldn’t have been surprised. But not gratified.

What would this super-judgmental gallery have preferred? That Trump opened this mini-summit by spitting in Putin’s face while punching him in the guts? Well, maybe so. When the Russian nuclear missiles arrived across the Bering Strait shortly thereafter, his detractors would have one more offense to heap on Trump.

Anything less than a smashmouth greeting by martial-arts fan Trump would have been described falsely as Trump covering Putin’s head and torso with thousands of kisses.

It should be protocol that if two major heads of state, even hostile ones, go so far as to get together for a formal meeting, they’re not expected to start by rolling around on the ground trying to pin the opponent for strangulation. Or deputizing their guards for the task if they didn’t feel personally in the best of shape.

No doubt who was responsible

There was no doubt why Trump and Putin met. Putin was responsible for opening war on Ukraine in February 2022, and Trump hoped to bring the prolonged bloodletting to an end.

(One of my first posts at Substack coincidentally was just after the war began and I interviewed a Ukrainian woman I knew and also three Polish men who happened to be here in Phoenix. No one thought then that the war still would be grinding along in the second half of 2025! I posted the story here on March 23, 2022: “Eastern Europeans studying freedom in Arizona look at what's happening back home — The Ukrainian invasion as seen from Phoenix — Russia won’t be allowed to win.”)

Putin was said to flatter Trump in Anchorage by saying that if (weak, confused Democrat) Joe Biden hasn’t been president at the time, the war wouldn’t have started. Very possibly true. But Biden is gone. So why not Putin call off the war now? Would he say the inertia of motion continues to push him forward? Possibly true, to an extent. But a strong leader should be able to stand up to and correct this velocity. Would he say that Russian pride would be hurt if his nation ceased the battle? But nations have suffered worse because they wouldn’t dare to be a bit contrite.

Even though Trump’s critics unfairly blasted him as a loser in Anchorage even before the two men touched fingers, as noted above, it seemed valid to conclude that Trump came out diminished by the time the (surprisingly brief?) meeting was over in three or so hours.

Each man made only a brief statement at the end — Putin’s twice as long, at about eight minutes, and they didn’t take a single question from reporters. Neither man won bragging rights.

Good results vanish

Trump had gone into the session claiming what a good result he’d get before the day was over. However, that didn’t happen at all — unless there was some development quite concealed from the public that we are to learn later.

No doubt Trump had effected many serious, desirable conservative changes during this beginning of his second term in the White House. But the Anchorage summit wasn’t one of them. Comments from readers that I checked on at a major British website indicated that many of them justifiably thought Trump hadn’t delivered the desired results. That didn’t help achieving the image he sought.

There’s always another day. But now Trump had to climb out of this hole instead of being king of the August 15 hill.

And quite apart from what Trump failed to win, it hardly was auspicious when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Alaska wearing a sweatshirt lettered “CCCP” that peeked out from his jacket. Lavrov wasn’t ripping open his jacket Superman-style to reveal what was underneath. Still, even if he hadn’t intended for anyone to see the sweatshirt, why did he have it in his wardrobe even now?

CCCP are the Cyrillic characters for USSR, which we who lived through the poisonous years of Soviet power saw all too often, from lettering on rockets being launched to their Olympians’ uniforms.

Americans may have put various messages on their own sweatshirts, but to have done a “CCCP” would have been looking for a fight (except maybe at some Marxist-sympathizing spots in Manhattan).

Would we have felt very comforted if a current German government official arrived for a conference wearing a swastika sweatshirt beneath his jacket? If he dared to do so, he presumably would have been thrown out of his job immediately. But there was no hint Lavrov would suffer this fate. Was he making an ill-advised attempt to be humorous?

(Shades of a university languages class, I learned that the Russian word for “union” is “soyuz,” thus the first letter of the USSR being an “s” rather than a “u.” Otherwise, both the English and Russian words for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are recognizable cognates.)

Putin had asked for the meeting

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on August 12 said Putin himself asked for this upcoming meeting. So he must have been feeling some pain points.

Who would have thought 3 1/2 years ago that Ukraine would have been able to hold out so long against its larger, stronger adversary? That was a tribute to the Ukrainian people. Despite Russia’s advantages, though, the long war was draining Moscow’s own resources, human and material.

Putin — and indeed Russians — were said to feel buoyed because Russia had been treated on an equal level with the U.S. during the Alaskan visit. Well, if Russia previously had been dragged lower, that at least in part was due to leaders’ poor decisions.

Probably people throughout the world had been eager to welcome a new Russia freed from — among the abominations — the cruelty, oppression and deceit of the Soviet Union. In their own small way, Moscow restaurants decorated for Southern California beach life (!!) or Western steakhouses delivered a measure of assurance that a different era was here.

Russians themselves, once assured that Stalin wasn’t about to climb off his bier now and start hanging “traitors,” seemed to welcome the future with the U.S. as among its friends. Before Putin’s Ukraine war, it seemed we Americans happily could walk through Moscow and St. Petersburg at ease. Putin still was in charge, though, and one young Moscow man I spoke with in Phoenix referred to him as a dictator. At least these days, he was free to travel to Arizona, and to describe the ruler back home in such terms.

One strange note, however, was that many U.S. leftists had been more at ease with Soviet Communism than the not-yet-freed new Russia. They dreamed of “convergence,” whereby the USSR would become a bit like us and we would become a bit more like the USSR. But, to them, perish the thought that communism simply would crumple to the dust and U.S. capitalism would survive!

Just blamed for anything

Trump for years had been brushing off misplaced dominant-media criticisms of himself, so whatever attack he incurred over the Anchorage meeting was no worse than before. He’ll just be blamed for anything. One misguided example was an article posted (before the Anchorage summit) on August 15 at the UK Telegraph, “Trump chaos triggers decline of Las Vegas — The slump in Sin City’s tourism industry raises fears over the health of America’s economy.”

A number of Telegraph readers’ reactions offered reasons other than Donald Trump to blame for Las Vegas’s economic fate.

Meanwhile, shortly before the summit, Trump commented that even if Russia gave him Moscow and Leningrad and expected nothing in return, the press would say he didn’t succeed — “The Fake News is working overtime… If I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal!”

The major Paris daily Le Figaro noted that after the USSR fell, Leningrad returned to its historic, and religious, name of Saint Petersburg, the second largest city in the nation. Perhaps because it was Leningrad during much of his life, Trump made this getting-old person’s error of what he had been used to calling it. But that’s living in the past, and the Anchorage summit, like much else, calls for going forward.