Fox News host Howard Kurtz has delivered a brutal assessment of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Media Buzz host said Sunday that “despite some upbeat talk” after Friday’s summit on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine, “it was clear not much was accomplished.”
“No ceasefire, no details, no questions from the press, just vague assurances that some progress was made without explaining what that was,” he continued.
Trump remained ambiguous at a joint presser with Putin following the meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, saying that “many points were agreed to.” He conceded that he “didn’t get there” on the peace deal he’s been pushing for Russia and Ukraine.
While the presser had initially been billed as a news conference, the two leaders did not take questions from journalists.
“President Trump, to his credit, didn’t oversell what happened, or more precisely, what didn’t happen,” Kurtz said.
He noted that the meeting, which did not include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, had been preceded by a White House effort to dramatically lower expectations as it became clear in the days before the summit that Trump would not be able negotiate a deal both Russia and Ukraine would agree to.
“The media reaction to the Alaska session varied sharply, but much of it was negative,” Kurtz observed, before asking guest Rich Lowry, the editor-in-chief of the conservative National Review, if he saw the summit as a “setback” for Trump.
“Putin moved the ball a little bit in his direction,” Lowry said, “putting off the talk of the ceasefire, at least for now, and getting Trump to stop threatening secondary sanctions and harsher measures.”
However, he said, “You can’t be premature on these things, you can’t judge them too quickly,” adding that he remains in “wait-and-see mode.”
Kurtz then highlighted Trump’s outburst on Truth Social Sunday morning, when the president raged against negative coverage of the summit in a series of posts, writing, “Fake News violently distorts the TRUTH when it comes to me.”
“So [Trump] sees this as a success, obviously, and [believes that] the coverage is not going along,” Kurtz said, before noting that Fox News had confirmed that “Trump is going along with a Putin plan” that includes several costly concessions, including abandoning a ceasefire and ceding the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Lowry admitted, “It’s going to be a hard pill to swallow.”
However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back Sunday on reports that Trump supports such a plan, saying, “These are things that the Ukrainian side is going to have to agree to.”
Meanwhile, another guest, former Biden aide Meghan Hays, blasted Trump for letting Putin “have the red carpet” both “metaphorically and actually.”
Trump welcomed Putin on a red carpet upon his arrival, which marked the first time the Russian dictator had set foot on U.S. soil in a decade.
Hays argued that the U.S. had, in effect, “validated” Putin, and made it an “ally of Russia, rather than an ally of Ukraine and our NATO allies.”
Putin left the summit, which ended earlier than planned, with no new sanctions on his country, despite Trump having threatened them for months before chickening out.
