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Meanwhile in America
CNN

July 11, 2025

 

 

 

Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

Trump's Putin epiphany

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Trump and Putin pose for a photo before a closed-door meeting in 2018. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

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“He's very nice all the time," Donald Trump said of Vladimir Putin this week. "But it turns out to be meaningless."

 

You think? 

 

The US president may be the last person in the Western world to reach this epiphany about the Russian strongman, whom Trump has lionized despite his bloody invasion of Ukraine.

 

In a comment typical of his unique brand of profane statesmanship, Trump accused Putin of spinning “bullsh*t” after he stalled and refused every US offer for a ceasefire in the war. 

 

So, rather remarkably, five months after erupting against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Trump seems to be leaning towards Kyiv rather than Moscow.

 

Let’s not make too much of this. Every time Trump has criticized the Russian leader this year, he has followed up by leavening his remarks. But this time does seem a little different. After repeated phone conversations with Putin, Trump is angry that his push for a peace deal in Ukraine that might yield the Nobel Prize is going nowhere.

 

From a Western perspective, the Russian leader may be guilty of an extraordinary self-inflicted political gaffe. He could have had a US-backed peace deal that Ukraine’s allies in Europe feared would reward his aggression, lock in territorial gains, and set down in stone that Ukraine would never have a path to NATO membership.

 

But imposing Western logic on Putin’s calculations is always a mistake.

 

Putin made clear before the invasion that he sees the war in Ukraine as righting a historic wrong — both over Russia’s age-old claims to the territory and his wider grievances that date back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Russia speaks of the “root causes” of the war — code for Russian grievances that include the existence of a democratic government in Kyiv. It sometimes refers to Moscow’s claims that it is threatened by NATO’s expansion after the Cold War, and to its desire to see alliance troops withdrawn from states once in the Soviet Union’s orbit, such as Poland and Romania.

 

The Russian leader may never have intended to end the war. Calculations by Trump and his aides that Putin could be persuaded to do a “deal” — the central assumption of the president’s entire world view — were misguided. After hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties, continuing the war may even be necessary to Putin’s political survival.

 

For years, countless US and European observers have tried to convince Trump of the risks of negotiating with Putin.

 

It’s stunning that it it took the US president so long to get it.

 

 

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The death of truth 

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Trump’s cabal of conspiracy theorists is getting its comeuppance.

 

MAGA world is in uproar after the FBI and Justice Department said that notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was not murdered in prison — and that there is no evidence of a list of famous clients who participated in sex trafficking with him.

 

It’s an unwelcome revelation for top Trump Cabinet members responsible for justice and law and order, who spent the last few years promoting these wild conspiracies.

 

Even in office, Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi stoked the flames, implying in an interview on Fox News that she had the notorious list on her desk. She later tried to clarify her remarks, telling reporters "I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed – meaning the file along with the JFK, MLK files as well. That’s what I meant by that."

 

FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, who both made big money in the conspiratorial swamps of far-right media before being plucked by Trump to run the “deep state” they once decried also faced embarrassing climb downs on the issue.

 

But the problem with conspiracy theories is that the truth only perpetuates the madness. MAGA media is now alive with claims of a cover-up. And the internet is boiling with speculation about a so-called missing minute on prison surveillance tapes of Epstein in his cell.

 

This is more serious than Bondi, Patel and Bongino being hoist with their own petards.

 

They are among the most prominent Trump acolytes who’ve destroyed the concept of truth. 

 

Once that’s gone — chaos looms.

What to watch for as Trump mulls a new Ukraine policy 

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Trump has spoken in recent days about the terrible human toll inflicted on Ukrainians and the courage of their armed forces. But his willingness to stand with Zelensky’s government in the long haul may depend on whether he’s simply mad at Putin for depriving him of a deal that would bolster his own aspirations to be a peacemaker and win a Nobel Prize, or whether he’s taking a new strategic position on the war. 

 

Given Trump’s transactional nature, some analysts have speculated that if his hopes of a Ukraine peace deal falter, he might simply compartmentalize the war and try to deal with Russia on other issues — especially on economics and business. That would permit Putin to continue the conflict without US interference.  

 

Russia’s next moves could also influence Trump’s strategy.

 

There were some signs coming out of a meeting between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Malaysia on Thursday that US hopes of engaging Russia on the war are not dead. Rubio said he expressed Trump’s “disappointment and frustration” but also said Russia had come up with “a new and different approach.”

 

Does Putin now think he’s gone too far and needs to get Trump back on side, perhaps by handing the US president a symbolic “win?” Or is this just classic Russian obfuscation in prolonging a hopeless process of talking while its troops fight?

 

One thing to look for will be whether Trump’s chastening rebuff from Putin changes his approach to diplomacy more generally. The president has long boasted that his “great relationship” with the Russian leader and Chinese President Xi Jinping would yield victories for the United States that no other president could land. But as with North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un in his first term, his supposed magnetism has produced very little of substance.

 

The geopolitical backdrop to the Ukraine issue has also shifted in recent weeks. Trump’s recent strikes on Iran might not have “obliterated” the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites as he claims. But they were a demonstration of American military might and a success for a commander-in-chief who ordered them. For all his threats to democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law in the United States, Trump is clearly established as the world’s most powerful leader whose daily moves send shockwaves around the world.

 

Could this shift his view of Putin from model strongman to merely the leader of an inferior power? 

Thanks for reading.

 

On Friday, Trump is expected to visit flood-ravaged central Texas.

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