Buyer and seller
The big picture: White House advisers claim that Monday’s crucial meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington is evidence of momentum from the summit with Putin.
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“There’s a way to make a deal: get the buyer and the seller in the same room at the same time discussing it,” said one of the Trump advisers familiar with the talks. “What we’re trying to figure out is if both sides really want a deal and what the contours look like.”
Yes, right, that’s exactly what this is, it’s pure unadulterated deal-making, like when you go to a yard sale and try to get the price down on a toaster.
I’m not sure who is the buyer and who is the seller here. Zelensky certainly isn’t selling anything; he’s being ordered to give it away. Perhaps Donald is the seller, trying to persuade Zelensky to buy a load of horse manure by convincing him it’s a horse.
I think Zelensky is smarter than that.
Putin is in the great tradition of Russian Tsarism, from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin to himself. There is only one fate for losers in that tradition, and that is arrest, maybe a show trial, and then a quick trip to the basement of the Lubyanka or equivalent, for a bullet in the back of the head.
Putin is trained in judo, and sits at what must be the longest and largest desk in the world. He clearly does not like the possibility of being taken by surprise, even when inside the Kremlin. And God knows he has made enough enemies on his way up to sink a whole navy.
The history of megalomaniacs in power shows that appeasement of them only whets their appetites for more. The ‘art of the deal’ in their cases is to call their bluff. This the European leaders appear to be doing, contra that noise-generator called Donald Trump.