Fresh off his showy Singapore summit with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, President Trump is pushing his team to arrange another dramatic one-on-one meeting, this time with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, as soon as this summer. Negotiations with the Kremlin have been under way for weeks. “There’s no stopping him,” a senior Administration official familiar with the internal deliberations said. “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.”
Ever since Putin’s reëlection in March to another six-year term, Trump has been pressing for a Putin summit, dismissing advisers’ warnings about the political dangers of such a meeting, given the ongoing special-counsel investigation into whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia as it interfered in the 2016 U.S. election on Trump’s behalf. With the Russia allegations swirling, Trump never had the formal meeting he wanted with Putin last year—settling for just two brief encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings—but he has clearly never given up on his campaign vision of closer ties with the Russian strongman, whose autocratic rule he has often praised. The North Korea summit this week, which Trump jubilantly declared a “historic” encounter that will lead to the end of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, has likely sealed the deal for an equally high-profile Putin meeting. Now Russia experts inside and outside the U.S. government are bracing themselves for a formal announcement of the summit, which is likely to happen as early as July, when Trump will be in Europe for the annual meeting of the NATO alliance, which Putin considers his country’s mortal enemy.
Negotiations began in earnest, the senior Administration official told me, after Trump disregarded his aides’ “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” warning in his post-election phone call with Putin, in March. During the conversation, Trump both congratulated the Russian leader on his election—which Western election observers said had failed to offer voters a real choice—and issued Putin an invitation to the White House. After the call, the Kremlin quickly released word of the invitation and began publicly lobbying to pin down a date for a summit, but, privately, the Russian President balked at the Oval Office as the meeting’s venue. “Putin doesn’t want to come to Washington. Putin wants to meet in a third-party location,” the senior Administration official told me. “Originally, Trump didn’t want to do that,” but the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Putin asked Austria’s new hard-right populist Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, to arrange the summit for Vienna, and the White House is considering the proposal. Two former senior U.S. officials told me that they had also been briefed on Trump’s orders to his staff to plan for the Putin summit soon. One of them said it could even occur on the first leg of Trump’s trip to Europe next month, before Trump attends the annual NATO meeting. Getting together with Putin before the allies would be “breaking every rule we’ve ever had,” the former U.S. official said, a flagrant breach of protocol sure to upset Europeans already jittery over Trump’s criticism of the NATO alliance and his public embrace of Putin.
A Russia summit would seem to be a perfect next act for a President who has embraced personal diplomacy with American adversaries as the signature of his foreign policy. Trump’s pursuit of a one-on-one with Putin mirrors his spur-of-the-moment decision to meet with the North Korean leader: a major policy move carried out in spite of his advisers, not because of them, and with little genuine support from either Republicans or Democrats. A Putin meeting, though, would be far more politically explosive than this week’s Singapore summit, given the President’s intensifying campaign to discredit or block the special counsel’s investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia as the country worked to help elect him.
But Trump, who has increasingly acted like a President unbound, seems undeterred by the troublesome politics that would make a Putin summit unimaginable at this point in any other Presidency. Last Friday, in fact, Trump mounted his most explicitly pro-Putin foreign-policy gambit yet, even as he assailed longtime allies for what he claimed were unfair trade practices. As he flew off to Canada for the annual G-7 economic summit, Trump publicly demanded that Russia be re-admitted to the group. The proposal for a reconstituted G-8 had not been part of any serious discussions by Trump’s foreign-policy team, according the senior official, but that didn’t stop the President from making it. “It was right out of the blue,” the senior official told me. “No one has ever said anything about that.” Trump seemed unaware of, or at least undeterred by, the fact that it was the United States itself—with the strong support of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress—that championed the expulsion of Russia from the group in response to Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. Even after Trump’s idea was quickly rebuffed by his increasingly angry G-7 allies, the U.S. President continued to push his Russia proposal.
Indeed, it was still very much on his mind as he prepared to fly back from his Singapore summit with Kim. Asked by Fox News’s Bret Baier about his Russia plan, Trump said that the G-7 already spends much of its time on its troubled relationship with Putin, so the group should invite him back to the table. “You know, we spend probably twenty-five per cent of our time talking about Russia, and I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if they were here?’ ” Trump told Baier aboard Air Force One. He went on to muse about how well he would get along with Putin, if only they could meet. “Now, I think I would probably have a good relationship with him. Or I will be able to talk to him better than if you call somebody on the telephone to talk,” Trump said.
Trump’s renewed public courting of Putin is not the only sign that the President feels increasingly emboldened, both on the world stage and at home. From free trade to the virtues of negotiating with dictators, Trump has made a series of dramatic moves in recent weeks that have alienated longtime allies and bucked decades-old, core precepts of the Republican Party.
And yet Trump’s political standing among members of his own party remains strong and is, arguably, growing. The political costs of opposing him were on stark display in a Republican primary this week in South Carolina, where one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics in Congress, Mark Sanford, was defeated, only a few hours after Trump had called for his ouster in a tweet while flying home from Singapore. “We are the party of Donald J. Trump,” Sanford’s victorious opponent, Katie Arrington, crowed in her victory speech.
Increasingly few Republicans are willing to stand in Trump’s way, even when the President’s policies clash with their own deeply held views. Last week, the G.O.P. blocked an attempt by moderates in the party to undo the President’s announced steel and aluminum tariffs on allies. On North Korea, many skeptical Republicans held their fire about the summit’s results, or offered tepid concern about Trump’s laudatory language toward one of the world’s great human-rights abusers. The public response by the G.O.P. officials was a stark contrast to the expert commentary, best summed up by the cover line of The Economist on Thursday: “Kim Jong Won.” On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the G.O.P. leadership in the Senate this week was blocking an attempt to undo the announced tariffs. One of Trump’s few remaining Republican critics, Senator Bob Corker, had been the lead sponsor of the measure stopped by the leadership, and he lamented his party’s failure to stand up for its previous bedrock principle of free trade. Corker said in a Senate-floor speech, which quickly went viral on social media, that “ninety-five per cent of the people on this side of the aisle” supported, at least in theory, his proposal to remove the tariffs. Yet fear of the President was stopping them from allowing a vote on it. “But, no, no, no, gosh, ‘We might poke the bear’ is the language I’ve been hearing. . . . We might poke the bear. The President might get upset with us . . . so we’re going to do everything we can to block it.” A day later, Corker told reporters in a Senate hallway that he feared for the “cult-like” devotion the Party now had for Trump.
The skirmish over free trade was striking, but it was hardly surprising. Just a couple weeks ago, the former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner had predicted many more such episodes. “There is no Republican Party. There is a Trump Party,” a relaxed Boehner, who retired in 2015, said at a conference in Mackinac, Michigan, where he was shown sipping a Bloody Mary onstage. “The Republican Party is taking a nap somewhere.” The political reality is simply this: President Trump is now too popular with the Republican base to challenge, even when he appears to be upending policies the party of Reagan has embraced for decades.
Russia may soon to turn out to be yet another test. Washington’s Russia hands are already steeling themselves for the possibility of a lavish, televised lovefest between the President and Putin. The President appears to have no agenda for his desired summit beyond the wish that it take place, leading many experts to fear that the meeting could turn out to be little more than a “bonding session with another brutal dictator,” as Alexander Vershbow, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia during George W. Bush’s Presidency, put it. Many Russia experts, however, worry that Putin is intent upon securing major concessions from Trump, such as relief from the tough economic sanctions that the U.S. and its allies have imposed on Russia since its 2014 Crimea invasion and 2016 election meddling. And Trump, they fear, might want to give it to him (though a veto-proof majority in Congress stood by the sanctions just last year).
Inside the Administration, Trump’s ambassador to Moscow, the former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, was recently back in Washington to plan for the possible talks, and the senior Administration official told me that Huntsman, the national-security adviser, John Bolton, and the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, have accepted the idea that Trump will insist upon a meeting. Those advisers are all well-known Russia skeptics who’ve spent years advocating for hawkish policies to counter threats from an increasingly aggressive Putin, and they will want to push Putin to cease hostilities in eastern Ukraine. But, as Trump showed with North Korea, that may matter little to the President.
Consider the example of Bolton, who for years has ridiculed the idea that the North Koreans could be counted on to abide by any negotiated deal with the United States. A hawk who demeaned the Bush Administration’s negotiations with North Korea even while serving in it, Bolton once said that being called “human scum” by the North Koreans was “the highest accolade I received during all my service in the Bush years.” Barely a month before his appointment as Trump’s national-security adviser, Bolton published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, headlined “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.” And yet there he was in Singapore on Tuesday, shaking Kim Jong Un’s hand and watching the President of the United States shower the dictator with praise. “He’s the national-security adviser,” Nicholas Eberstadt, a close observer of North Korea and and a longtime colleague of Bolton’s at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank, said. “He’s not the national-security decider.”
