This time last week, Donald Trump was on
his way to Alaska for his fateful summit
with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Exactly one week ago, President Trump
was still indicating that unless the
Russian leader agreed to a ceasefire in
Ukraine, or at the least a clear
willingness to begin the process of
wrapping his war up, the president would
unleash very severe consequences on
Moscow. Remember this bravado. If I
weren't president, in my opinion, he
would much rather take off take over all
of Ukraine. But I am president and he's
not going to mess around with me.
>> Well, guess what? He did mess around
with him big time. But only after
President Trump clapped like a
performing seal, welcoming the arrival
of a fishy treat when Putin disembarked
from his jet and set foot on US soil for
the first time in a decade. And only
after the US president allowed the
Kremlin leader smiling like the Cheshire
cat to join him on the back seat of the
beast, Trump's armored limo as it
conveyed both of them to the summit
site. From there for Donald Trump,
everything went downhill. As we summised
last week on American Week, the Russian
president had seen his host coming and
left Trump's staff reeling. If you don't
believe me, maybe you'll believe Jackie
Heinrich, White House correspondent for
Fox News.
>> It was just very unusual, uh, atypical,
and I think we're all awaiting, you
know, the readout because the way that
it felt in the room, um, was not not
good. Uh, it it did not seem like things
went well and it seemed like Putin came
in and steamrololled. Uh, got right into
what he wanted to say. Who would ever
have imagined Vladimir Putin
steamrollering Donald Trump if only we'd
had an inkling? NBC News reported that
the president's entourage, including
special envoy Steve Witoff, looked ashen
as Trump conceded in
uncharacteristically brief remarks to
the press that he'd basically got
nowhere.
>> There were many, many points that we
agreed on, most of them, I would say, a
couple of big ones that we haven't quite
gotten there, but we've made some
headway. So, uh, there's no deal until
there's a deal.
>> What followed next was exactly as Putin
had anticipated. Last Saturday, Trump
played a round of golf with Steve
Witoff, the special envoy, who has
served very much as his Putin whisperer.
By the time it was over, Trump had
abandoned all thought of those very
severe consequences if Putin messed
around with him. and instead he
repositioned himself paring Putin's
positions indicating that yes Ukraine
should surrender the entire eastern
region of Donbass in negotiations that
no Ukraine can never be a member of NATO
and that the ceasefire he said he
coveted going into last Friday's Alaska
summit was no longer either on the
agenda or even necessary.
>> I don't think you need a ceasefire. You
know, if you look at the six deals that
I settled this year, they were all at
war. I didn't do any ceasefires. And uh
I know that it might be good to have,
but I can also understand strategically
why well, you know, one country or the
other wouldn't want it.
>> There is only one country that doesn't
want a truce, and it's not the one
headed by President Vadomir Zalinski,
who was sitting alongside President
Trump there on Monday in the Oval Office
as the US leader embraced Putin's
positions. Just on the facts, Trump
keeps claiming that he settled six wars
this year without the need for any
ceasefires. Well, that will come as news
to among others, the Indians and the
Pakistanis, as well as the Cambodians
and the ties, all of whom recently
agreed to ceasefires that President
Trump at the time claimed he had
brokered. He did not end wars between
them. European leaders, including the
prime minister, who raced to Washington
to try and flatter President Trump out
of Vladimir Putin's orbit, succeeded in
protecting Zalinski from another Oval
Office drubbing. But on other issues,
they made less headway. Friedrich Mertz,
the German chancellor, did give it the
old college try. The way is open for
complicated negotiations and to be
honest we all would like to see a
ceasefire
the latest from the next meeting on I
can't imagine that the next meeting
would took place without a ceasefire
>> I will say and again I say it uh in the
six wars that I've settled I haven't had
a ceasefire
>> that is just one example of so many this
week where the president concocted facts
out of thin air. And it should be deeply
worrying in Kiev at number 10 and all
over Europe that Ukraine and its allies
are now dealing with an American
president who cannot even stipulate to
facts.
>> It's not a war that should have been
started. You don't do that. You don't
take you don't take on a nation that's
10 times your size.
>> That was Trump this week falsely
claiming yet again that Ukraine started
the war. And in that interview with Fox
News, he went much further, revealing a
version of history that is flatly
incorrect and heavily influenced by
Putin and his Kremlin talking points.
Here he is claiming that Ukraine started
the war in order to get Crimea back from
the Russians who seized it in 2014.
>> They went in, they said, "We want you,
you know, we want to get Crimea back."
This was at the beginning. Now Putin, in
all fairness to him, he made a good
deal. Well, he got it from Obama all
because Barack Hussein Obama gave it
away in one of the dumbest real estate
deals I've ever seen.
>> Now, that is completely untrue. You can
certainly fault Barack Obama for not
taking stronger action to liberate
Crimea from Russian annexation. But he
never gave it away in some kind of real
estate deal. To the point where even
Trump's government, his own
administration, still recognizes Crimea
as sovereign Ukrainian territory and
rejects Russia's claims to it outright.
Also in that interview, he spoke
palpable nonsense, again straight from
the Kremlin's talking points, about
NATO, Ukraine's desire to be a member of
it, and the expansion of the alliance.
long before Putin, it was a no no by
Russia or the Soviet Union or anything
you want to call it. Sort of a similar
thing as it gets larger, but uh very
similar. But it was it was always a no
no. You could not Russia said we don't
want uh the so-called opponent or the
enemy, let's use that term, we don't
want them on our border. And they were
right.
>> Again, everything about that is wrong.
As far back as 1991, long before Putin,
Russian President Boris Yelten indicated
that he was interested in NATO
membership. And then a decade later in
2001, Vladimir Putin told President Bill
Clinton that he too fancied the idea of
Russia joining NATO. And it was not the
positioning of NATO forces on Russia's
borders that led to the war on Ukraine.
It was the other way round. The
Kremlin's decision to invade its
neighbor led to the repositioning of
NATO forces. And all of this matters
because it demonstrates that Putin's
newspak has now colonized Trump's mind.
And not only, it turns out, on
international affairs.
>> Vladimir Putin said something, one of
the most interesting things. He said,
"Your election was rigged because you
have mailin voting." He said, "Mailin
voting every election." And he said, "No
country has mail-in voting. It's
impossible to have mail-in voting and
have honest elections." And he said that
to me. It was very because we talked
about 2020. He said, "You won that
election by so much." And that's how he
got it. He said, "And if you would have
won, we wouldn't have had a war. You'd
have all these millions of people alive
now instead of dead." That's the
president talking in Alaska to Shan
Hannity on Fox News, revealing publicly
that Vladimir Putin engaged only last
Friday in direct interference in the
next American election. He told Trump
exactly what he knew the American
president wanted to hear and essentially
instructed him to undermine democracy
further by making it more complicated
for Americans to vote. on Monday, as if
by magic,
>> mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in
ballots. You can never have a real
democracy with mail-in ballots. And we,
as a Republican party, are going to do
everything possible that we get rid of
mail-in ballots. We're going to start
with an executive order that's being
written right now by the best lawyers in
the country to end mail-in ballots
because they're corrupt. And uh do you
know that we're the only country in the
world, I believe, I may be wrong, but
just about the only country in the world
that uses them.
>> He is wrong. You want to know another
country that uses them? Russia. Turns
out a bloke called Vladimir Putin signed
a law permitting postal voting in 2020.
It was a funny old year, but then so's
this one. We're back with a Fox News
alert. We're just learning, learning the
FBI agents have raided the Maryland home
of former Trump National Security
Adviser John Bolton. It happened at 7
a.m. this morning.
>> Shortly after the raid began, FBI
director Cash Patel posting on X, quote,
"No one is above the law. FBI agents on
a mission." And I'm sure it's a complete
coincidence that a batch of documents
possibly damaging to Donald Trump
pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein is due to
be delivered today to a House of
Representatives committee. John Bolton,
of course, a former top Trump official,
has become one of the president's most
persistent critics. The FBI raid is the
latest indication that we're now living
under authoritarianism here. Another
sign of that was Trump's claim this week
that the Smithsonian Institutions
museums in Washington focused too much
on how bad slavery was and
insufficiently on the brightness of
America. Brightness, you say? Well,
here's the president last night talking
to some of the federal agents that he's
deployed on the streets of Washington to
deal with a largely concocted crime wave
in the city. And he had exciting news
for all of us. See, one of the things
we're going to be redoing is your parks.
I'm very good at grass because I have a
lot of golf courses all over the place.
I know more about grass than any human
being, I think, anywhere in the world.
We're going to have all brand new,
beautiful grass. You know, like
everything else, grass has a life. Do
you know that grass has a life? You
know, we have a life and grass has a
life. And the grass here died about 40
years ago.
>> Grass has a life. Indeed, it does. But
at the end of a week in which Vladimir
Putin firmly kicked Donald Trump's
Ukrainian ball into the long grass, you
could argue that maybe the Russian
leader knows more about how to play the
green stuff than his opposite number in
the White House.