For a 79-year-old narcissist, postponing problems is the same as solving them. If the costs come due after such a person is gone, they just don’t care. There is no tomorrow. There is only your today. Time stops when you do.
For a 79-year-old narcissist, patriotism and public service are empty words. What matters is only how you feel, how you are treated, what’s in it for you.
For a 79-year-old narcissist, decency is a meaningless abstraction. Compassion is beyond comprehension, something you hear of but do not understand.
It is therefore dangerous to entrust the fate of nations to such a man. It is not that such traits might lead him to betray his country—he was never committed to his country to begin with. Or his wives. Or his children. Or his business partners. Or his political allies.
Watching President Donald Trump manage his staged, showy, and ultimately largely results-free summit in Alaska on Friday with Vladimir Putin, it became clear once again that Trump’s character is so warped, so defective that America’s standing in the world is now a secondary consequence of our president’s desperation to satisfy his own insatiable ego.
Where once we relied on the fact that national interests shaped the decisions of our leaders, today the engine that propels our ship of state is just our president’s vanity.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, was trained to understand and exploit such human weaknesses. His serial victories coming out of the summit were a sign that his experience as an intelligence officer paid off greatly for his country.
Putin gained a hero’s welcome from Trump. He literally had the red carpet rolled out for him. He was given an honor few heads of state enjoy and was invited to ride along with Trump in “the Beast,” America’s presidential limousine.
He got those rewards without offering any concessions, without reversing or promising to end any of the activities that have turned him into an international pariah, an indicted war criminal. All he had to do was flatter Trump.
Putin understood that Trump was so eager to appear to be a statesman that the U.S. president would do almost anything to spin whatever came out of their summit discussions as promising, as a success, even if it was mere symbolism, even if the biggest, most difficult issues remained unresolved, even if they might never be resolved. Never is, after all, a long time for an elderly narcissist. Give the old man the illusion of progress and a renewed flickering hope that he will finally receive the recognition as a “great man” that has eluded him his whole life, and Trump would make sure his lackeys would spin it as a victory even if once again kowtowing to murderous dictator was a blow to America’s standing in the world, to our allies, to Ukraine, and for world peace.
Imagine watching the events of Friday as the parent or husband or wife or friend of one of Putin’s hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian victims. Imagine being the mother of one of the 20,000 kidnapped Ukrainian children that Putin stole only to today watch the U.S. president applauding the arrival of the Russian murderer, awaiting him on the red carpet as those his arrival in Alaska was the homecoming that has been denied to those children or the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and citizens who will never return from the war.
Yes, there was posited at the strange post-summit “press conference” a vague if non-specific promise of some kind of follow-on conversations … why not …they will keep Trump’s charade that he is a peacemaker alive … but what is really likely to come out of this? When? At what cost? More questions than answers hung in the air as the two aging leaders quickly shuffled out of the hall without taking any questions.
Later on, Trump said “no deal” was reached. As if he had to clarify.
That said, Friday Trump revealed yet again that his views on Putin are as they ever were. He showed more warmth and respect and loyalty to the Russian president than he has ever shown to his country or to many members of his family or cabinet. That’s because Trump knows Putin has helped him get where he is and because he can relate to a man who cares about no one but himself and who has made his ruthlessness and greed work for him for decades.
While analysts scratched their head about the fact that the meeting produced no specific agreements and appeared to gain nothing for the United States, on some levels it nonetheless made sense. Trump changed the subject from Epstein. Trump got a hug from one of the few people in the world he respects and seems to emulate. Trump felt like a president doing president-y things.
By giving Trump those things, Putin got a much bigger return. He was the spy who was welcomed in from the cold. He got a U.S. leader to effectively shrug off his war crimes and to yet again buy into—it seems—Russia’s explanation of the origins of the war in Ukraine. And the Russian got to tee things up so that if Zelensky refuses to go along with a ceasefire or any peace process that may ultimately take place, Zelensky may well appear to Trump to be the bad guy, the one keeping him from his white tie Nobel Prize reception in Oslo.
One other thing seemed clear by the end of Trump’s long day in Alaska that was ignored by most of the commentators trying to make sense of the substance-free wrap-up to the summit. Trump appeared tired. He even appeared slightly bored. Low energy as he might put it. Maybe the negotiations were tougher than either side let on. Maybe there were just too many details to keep Trump’s attention.
Or maybe he was feeling defeated. Maybe he felt like this was all going to be too darn hard to work out. Maybe the idiocy of his promise to resolve this war in 24 hours was revealed to him more clearly than ever. Maybe it dawned on him that there would not be the payoff from this effort that he had hoped, not on his time frame, not the kind of quick, flashy, simplistic payoff that would really be the only kind that could matter to a 79-year-old narcissist.
After all, there’s a little bit of Mona Lisa Vito inside of Donald Trump, as in the scene in “My Cousin Vinny” where, played memorably by Marisa Tomei, she says, “My biological clock is ticking like this,” and she stamps on the floor with her booted foot. For the 79-year-old narcissist, it is becoming clearer and clearer to observers (Putin must have noticed) that every day Trump can hear the sounds of his presidential clock ticking in just the same way. Boom. Boom. Boom. Louder. More insistent. And, for those of you who really thought Trump was committed to seeking peace in Ukraine, it seems unlikely that things that don’t produce a rapid payoff are just not going to be worth his time and attention.
That’s why, should any future negotiations take place, if they are as complex as they are likely to be (and perhaps as the Epstein issue from which he wanted to distract fades away), the 79-year-old narcissist is likely to turn his attention elsewhere in search of the quick pick-me-up ego boosts for which he has a pathological need.
And then, in retrospect, this summit will all appear to be what it was from the beginning–just another Trump reality TV show that is as divorced from reality as is its increasingly pathetic host. Unfortunately, the damage done by such undertakings—whether by lifting up monsters or selling out our allies or making the world less safe—will live on long after Trump has forgotten they ever mattered to him.
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