By Timothy L. O’Brien / Bloomberg Opinion
Soon after Vladimir Putin arrived in Alaska last Friday to discuss how he might end his invasion of Ukraine, President Donald Trump ushered the Russian leader into the back of his armored limousine, known as “the Beast.”
The pair rode alone together for about 10 minutes before reaching a conference room where their formal meeting was to take place. Putin speaks passable English, and there were no interpreters in the car. No other aides or officials were with them either, and thus far there is no public record of what they chatted about.
This is generally how Trump prefers to court Putin. In prior meetings, including a particularly embarrassing confab in Helsinki in 2018, he has met Putin with only interpreters present or has simply confiscated notes of their discussions. There once was a pre-Trump world in which no president would have routinely sabotaged political transparency, good government, sound national security, federal recordkeeping rules and the history books by conducting the nation’s business in the dark. Those days are past, of course, but the mystery remains of what exactly Trump petitions Putin for whenever they huddle in the shadows.
The bright interpretation of all of this is that Trump is a deft dealmaker who relies on one-to-one glad-handing and cajoling to secure stellar outcomes for America and its allies. Apart from the fact that Trump’s track record as a businessman and president has been littered with deals gone awry, there is little to suggest that what Trump walked away with in Alaska was stellar. He went into the meeting with Putin claiming he would seek a ceasefire before negotiations to end the war could begin and left saying Ukraine and Russia should seek a peace deal.
In that configuration, Ukraine will possibly be left having to cede important swaths of its territory to Russia to assuage Trump and Putin. That isn’t a peace plan, however. It’s a capitulation. It replicates the error the West made in allowing Putin to invade and annex Crimea in 2014 in the belief that it would forestall further predations and a larger conflagration.
Putin has reportedly offered a written promise not to attack Ukraine again, but that guarantee is as reliable as the person making it. The peril in all of this, matched with Trump’s about-face in Alaska, is why several European leaders joined Volodymyr Zelensky for the Ukrainian leader’s meeting on Monday with Trump at the White House. The Europeans, well versed in Putin’s broader designs on the Baltic States and the continuing threat he poses, understand that strong-arming Zelensky into concessions may simply postpone further conflicts, not end them.
That leaves consideration of the unsettling reasons for Trump’s private time with Putin in the Beast and other venues. And that means letting go of considerations about “strategy” or “doctrines” or broad “policy goals” when trying to divine what motivates Trump as he unpredictably cartwheels from position to position and from statement to statement.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but the most useful lenses for understanding why Trump does what he does are self-aggrandizement and self-preservation. He is almost invariably motivated by at least one of those things; and often both. All of the energy that goes into speculating about his grand designs or philosophy is a distraction. He’s in it for himself.
You might conclude that his desire to use tax dollars to buy a federal stake in Intel Corp. signals that Trump is an aficionado of China-like state capitalism. You might think the same of his demands that Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. kick back 15% of their chip sales to China to Washington. And sure, you could also describe his desire to create a sovereign wealth fund bankrolled by foreign investment and personally managed by him as part of that plan, too.
Or you could remember that the hallmark of Trump’s second presidential term is how much he revels in finding and then exploiting every avenue of unilateral authority his office allows; economically, diplomatically and culturally. He is Donald Rex, emperor of all he surveys.
That’s how the U.S. ended up with a crazy quilt of tariffs that have had little to do with economic vibrancy, a manufacturing renaissance and rational trading regimes. They are there because Trump feels aggrieved and reality TV presentations in the Rose Garden allow him to unfurl a list of villains he can penalize. He enjoys it.
Are scientists and other researchers coming up with solutions that don’t correspond to a late 19th century understanding of public health? Defund them, because you can. Are universities too independent and hotbeds of lefty sentiment and intolerance? Defund them, because you can.
Are cryptocurrencies no longer a “scam,” as you once said they were, now that you’re in a position to mint billions for you and your family by supporting them as president? Of course they’re not, so throw the weight of the federal government behind them, because you can.
Are immigrants flooding the country and threatening public safety and the economy rather than filling jobs businesses need to fill? Round them up like sheep, strip them of their civil rights and deport them, because you can. Are cities swamped in crime at a scale that only you can see? Send in the National Guard, the FBI and unidentifiable agents in masks.
Much of this also plays to Trump’s political base, of course, and embraces very real public grievances that Democrats haven’t adequately addressed. But beyond haphazardly plucking at raw emotional nerves and dark, divisive sentiments, it doesn’t constitute a worldview beyond paranoia. Trump’s attempted cures have wildly overshot the dimensions of the problems fixating him. And the common thread is that his responses play to his own sense of what it means to rule and live large (which also happens to be a reason he fawns over Putin, another guy who gets to live very large).
Is Putin a great leader who should be coddled and appeased because you aspire to be just like him? Or does convening with him diplomatically offer an opportunity to talk about business deals in Russia like the one you were pursuing while running for president in 2016? Or whatever it was that you might have been kicking around in the back of the Beast? Fine, you can do that, too.
There isn’t lofty political and economic theory or three-dimensional chess at work here. It’s neither liberal nor conservative, either. It’s medieval and it’s monarchical. It’s self-aggrandizing. Trump is seen and he’s content, whatever happens to Ukraine, Europe and the U.S.’s national security along the way.
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion.
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