President Donald Trump has tried to put a positive spin on his “failure” of a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but things are not as rosy behind the scenes.
Longtime Trump biographer Michael Wolff tells The Daily Beast Podcast that a member of the president’s inner circle texted him bluntly on Friday: “F--ked.”
The insider did not elaborate.
However, Wolff noted that it is clear that Trump left Alaska as the loser, and those in the president’s camp surely know it, too.
“Trump got f---ed,” he said, agreeing with The Washington Post’s assessment that the summit was more pomp than substance. “We got nothing out of this. This is, you know, this is really, really a loss for Trump, and potentially a loss for Ukraine.”
Trump, 79, raised eyebrows from the moment he arrived in Anchorage, starting with his team ordering U.S. airmen to roll out a red carpet to welcome Putin.
Trump, after meandering his way to a meeting point, applauded Putin as he approached. F-35 fighter jets and a B-2 bomber completed a flyover. The men shook hands, smiled, and Trump invited the former KGB officer to take a ride inside the “Beast,” his presidential limo. Once inside, they smiled and waved out the windows.
It was a grand welcome for a leader who invaded a U.S. ally, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions more. And what, exactly, did Trump gain from offering this extravagant PR gift to the Kremlin?
Practically nothing, Wolff says.
“It was a failure,” he stated. “There is nothing that [Trump] could say. So he decided to, and remember, he threatened, ‘If we don’t get a deal, I’m going to walk away. I’m going to do tariffs. I’m going to do, you know, all of this.’ No, he did not do that. Instead, he basically embraced Vladimir Putin.”
Critics of the president noted that he appeared “defeated” after emerging from his meeting with Putin. The two leaders briefly sat for what was billed as a “press conference,” but no questions were answered.
Podcast Co-host and Daily Beast Chief Content Officer Joanna Coles said that Trump’s relative silence at the news conference was particularly telling given that he is usually not one to pass up answering questions from shouting reporters. She added of Trump’s cuddling up to Putin: “It’s embarrassing and it’s dirty.”
Ultimately, though, Trump had not received assurances of a ceasefire, which is what he said he sought to achieve by scheduling the high-profile meeting.
With his original objective dashed, Trump moved the goalposts. He claimed the summit was a success and that he no longer wants a ceasefire agreement, as they “oftentimes do not hold up.” That is likely unwelcome news to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been adamant that a peace deal cannot be reached until a ceasefire is put in place.
Sources told Axios that Trump called Zelensky to break the bad news while making the 3,500-mile trek home from Alaska on Air Force One, where Trump also sat for an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Trump and Zelensky spoke for an hour and a half in what Axios’ source described as a “difficult” conversation. Other European leaders joined the call in its final half hour, but their reactions were not recorded in the report.
Zelensky is due to travel to D.C. to meet Trump on Monday to discuss his country’s increasingly dire situation further. By then, it will have been six months since his last visit, when Trump and Vice President JD Vance chastised him in an Oval Office ambush that famously went off the rails.
In the meantime, the world is talking about Trump and Putin instead of Trump and the convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, which Wolff and Coles speculated may have been an intentional move by the White House.
Still, Wolff cautioned Trump that fervor regarding his association with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is not going anywhere—no matter what sort of distractions may crop up. Trump has faced backlash from his supporters after his administration concluded Epstein died by suicide in prison, rather than being murdered, and no “client list” of wealthy co-conspirators exists—the subject of whirling conspiracies among his base.
“That’s the thing about the Epstein [scandal],” Wolff said. “You just can’t shake it off. It sticks.”
Reached for comment, the White House provided a statement it has previously sent to the Daily Beast regarding Wolff.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--t and has been proven to be a fraud,” said Communications Director Steven Cheung. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
