Trump Just Made A Suspicious Last Minute Change to His Putin Meeting
BY PETER MELLADO
POLITICS | PUBLISHED ON JULY 6, 2017
For weeks now, White House officials have been uneasy about the high-stakes meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, set to take place tomorrow at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. So much so that there has been furious maneuvering by senior administration officials to have as many people in the meeting as possible, including known Putin critics in the government.
Their goal is to both protect the President against any Jedi mind tricks Putin might try, but also to prevent the kind of disastrous optics that a secretive meeting between the two would produce.
The President, apparently, doesn’t seem to care about optics, or about their concerns. Axios is reporting that Trump has kicked everyone out of the meeting except for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and a translator.
“According to an official familiar with the meeting’s planning,” Axios writer Jonathan Swan reported today, “it will be Trump, Putin, the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, and translators.”
Russia’s cyber and espionage operation to influence the 2016 election, and Trump’s consistent refusal to criticize the Russian dictator on any issue, including that very prescient one, have severely complicated the meeting already. Many critics of the President’s foreign policy are questioning why the meeting is happening in the first place. Closing the meeting to everyone except Tillerson, himself a longtime associate of Vladimir Putin, only adds to the appearance of intrigue and secrecy.
Putin is about as formidable a personality as Trump is likely to see, and many of his allies are concerned about the political damage negative optics may do. Others in the administration, particularly those who are still invested in NATOand other traditional American foreign policy positions and institutions, are worried that Putin will manipulate the President’s well established affection for him to gain pieces on the geopolitical chessboard. Republicans in congress are concerned as well.
The Russian strongman is desperate to see the crippling Obama-era sanctions for his invasion of Ukraine lifted, and he’s adamant that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad remain in power as part of any plan or peace deal to end the Syrian Civil War – something the United States is against. Putin may even try to gain recognition and legitimization of Russia’s annexation of Crimea – something Trump has hinted that he’s willing to consider – or push for some kind of policy shift in NATO that benefits Russia.
Officials are so worried about anything like these concessions developing that they’ve scrambled to include Putin critics in their preparations and briefings for the President, and to have them in the meeting itself.
The Daily Beast reported yesterday, that, “According to two White House aides, senior Trump administration officials have pressed for Fiona Hill — the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe and Russia and the author of critical psychological biography of Putin—to be in the room during the president’s highly anticipated meeting with Putin.”
At the very least, those concerned had hoped that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster would be in the meeting. McMaster, whether he singed up for the role or not, is seen by many as the adult in the room, a powerful normalizing and moderating force inside the White House. While that reputation has taken a hit following many mini scandals he’s remained silent on and, therefore, complicit in, he’s still viewed as a critical check against both the ideologically motivated Alt-Right zealots in the administration like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, and against the President’s own worst instincts on national security.
Both Fiona Hill and H.R. McMaster made the trip to Hamburg with the President, but now it appears they’ve been benched just hours before game time. It’s quite clear that Donald Trump wants to be alone with Vladimir Putin, and we need to know why.
washingtonjournal.com
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