Donald Trump met with Russian president Vladimir Putin a second time at this month’s G20 summit in Hamburg. Following the two leaders’ bilateral meeting on July 7, Trump and Putin spoke privately after a dinner hosted by German chancellor Angela Merkel.
According to multiple reports, the previously undisclosed one-on-one discussion (with a Russian translator) was about an hour long at the end of the dinner. A White House statement released after the initial reports claims Trump spoke just “briefly” with Putin, and as part of his “perfectly normal” duties to “interact” with world leaders. “There was no ‘second meeting’ between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of dinner,” read the White House’s statement in part.
So which is it? Is this “second meeting” a routine encounter at a summit of world leaders, brief and “perfectly normal”? If so, characterizing this moment as “previously undisclosed” unfairly implies the administration ought to have disclosed it and did not. The White House likely didn’t disclose every brief conversation Trump had with any other leaders at the G20, so why should such a meeting with Putin be any different?
But if their meeting was closer to an hour—a longer period of time than usual for exchanging pleasantries—why did it take a liberal foreign-policy expert to reveal the interaction more than a week after it took place? Given the host of Russia-related issues of concern to the United States, it would be worth knowing what Trump and Putin discussed and whether it followed from the conversation at their earlier meeting that day. And if the press reports are true, it would also be worth knowing why the White House did not disclose an additional hour of conversation with Putin, and why it continues to say otherwise.
Trump Weighing Sanctions Against Venezuela’s “Bad Leader”
The Trump administration is considering issuing new sanctions against Venezuela in response to president Nicolas Maduro’s plans to create a new legislature to supersede the country’s existing constitution. Reuters first reported the possibility of new sanctions against Maduro’s socialist government, which is holding on to power amid an ongoing economic crisis.
A senior administration official on Tuesday declined to specify which Venezuelan entities or persons would be sanctioned. The official said Trump fears Maduro is seeking “full dictatorship.”
“The president sees Venezuela as a disaster, and is particularly saddened by the fact that it’s a manmade disaster,” said the official. “It’s a bad leader who is moving in the direction of becoming a dictator who has taken a country that used to be an upper-middle-class country that certainly has the resources and the people to be an upper-middle-class country. And he has almost single-handedly destroyed it, through corruption, through narco trafficking, through many other means.”
Asked what the president’s guiding principle is on sanctioning or retaliating against bad actors like Maduro, the official spoke only to the Venezuelan example, where food shortages have led to severe weight loss and malnutrition in parts of the country. “He’s very troubled by the suffering of the Venezuelan people, and he wants us to do everything in our power to prevent the country from becoming the full dictatorship that Maduro wants it to be and to allow for it to be the robust democracy that the Venezuelan people want it to be,” said the official.
That answer is reminiscent of Trump’s justification for his April strike on an airfield in Syria. The airfield had been the launching point of a chemical weapons attack by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad that targeted civilians. The images of suffering children helped convince Trump to retaliate against Assad, despite being generally opposed to U.S. military intervention in the Syrian civil war.
Health Care Optimism
After it was clear Monday night the Senate’s Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill did not have enough Republican support, President Trump argued publicly that Congress should pass a bill of full repeal. When that plan (endorsed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell) quickly earned a fatal three GOP defections, the president fell back on an old rhetorical strategy: promising to “let Obamacare fail” until Democrats have no choice but to come to the negotiating table.
“I think we’re probably in that position where we’ll let Obamacare fail,” Trump told reporters at the White House Tuesday afternoon. “We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to us, and they are going to say ‘how do we fix it, how do we fix it?’ or ‘how do we come up with a new plan?’”
But if Trump is gambling that increased political pressure on Democrats and Republican holdouts may make them more malleable, he has a lot of ground to make up in the public eye. As the Washington Post has reported, 6 in 10 Americans now think that Obamacare’s problems are the responsibility of the GOP. Fairly or not, if Obamacare fails it may be Republicans who suffer the political consequences.
Despite everything, Trump said he was still optimistic about health-care reform.
“Obamacare is a big failure. It has to be changed,” he said. “We have to go to a plan that works. We have to go to a much less expensive plan in terms of premiums. Something will happen and it will be good. It may not be as quick as we had hoped, but it is going to happen.”
