Opinion: Trump embarrasses America. Again.
Published 4:30 pm Friday, August 22, 2025
Everyone recognized that last week’s summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Alaska began with a show of military might to impress Russian President Vladimir Putin. In an interview afterwards, Sen. Dan Sullivan said that holding the summit in Alaska also served as a reminder to Putin that “Americans are good negotiators.” After all, we bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 for a mere 2 cents per acre.
But what mattered to Putin at this moment in history was how easy it would be to get almost everything he wanted from President Donald Trump.
In May, Trump warned Putin that he’d order new sanctions if he didn’t agree to a 30-day ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine. At the end of July, he threatened Putin with severe sanctions if he didn’t agree to it within 10 days. During his flight to Alaska, he told Fox News reporter Brer Baier “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire.”
But he walked away without one. And Putin flew home with the threat of sanctions lifted, at least temporarily.
Trump was an easy mark for Putin. All he had to do is regurgitate one of his favorite lies. And flatter him with feigned respect.
During an interview with Sean Hannity that evening, Trump said Putin told him the 2020 “election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.” That “he won that election by so much.” And “we wouldn’t have had a war” if he had been president. Twice, he mentioned how happy he was to hear Putin make that last remark.
This isn’t the first time Trump roared in like a lion and came out like a lamb.
After the Parkland school shooting in 2018, he “strongly” pushed raising the age to 21 for purchasing some firearms. When Republican Sen. Pat Toomey told him that wasn’t included in the gun control legislation he was sponsoring, Trump replied “You know why? Because you’re afraid of the NRA.”
Within days, Trump dropped the idea because the NRA opposed it.
More recently, Wall Street came up with the acronym TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — in response to him repeatedly backing down on his tariffs.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the European leaders who met with Trump on Monday, all recognized that Putin got the better of Trump. And he more or less admitted it.
“All of us would obviously prefer an immediate ceasefire while we work on a lasting peace,” he told them. “And maybe something like that could happen. As of this moment, it’s not happening.”
So they focused on security guarantees for Ukraine which Sullivan noted was one of two positive takeaways from the summit. He found it encouraging that Putin recognized the importance of that and seemed sure he “never said that publicly before.”
On Sunday, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff described the guarantees as “robust” and “game-changing.”
But the way Putin prefaced his remark tells a different story. He said a long-term settlement must “eliminate all the primary roots, the primary causes of that conflict.”
Those include his false claim that Ukraine’s government was committing genocide against ethnic Russians. And Ukraine’s interest in joining the NATO alliance. In other words, it was Ukraine’s actions and ambitions that caused him to launch a preemptive invasion.
During a Tuesday morning interview on Fox and Friends, it was Trump’s turn to blame Ukraine. When asked if he discussed land swaps at the meeting on Monday, he merely said “they’re going to get a lot of land.”
“But this was a war, and Russia is a powerful military nation,” he continued. “It’s a much bigger nation. It’s not a war that should have been started. … you don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size.”
I guarantee you that Zelensky and his European allies weren’t the only ones who were disturbed but that remark. Sullivan was one of many congressional Republicans who were as well.
America’s military might have put on a display of strength last week to impress Putin. But all hopes he would agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine and genuinely work toward a just and lasting peace were dashed by the ignorant, weak-kneed negotiator who happens to be our president.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
