Putin Treated Trump With Scorn, Shattered His Ego: New Book

During a private meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Japan three years ago, then-US President Donald Trump was apparently so eager to impress Russian President Vladimir Putin that he unwittingly set himself up for a stinging retort from the Russian president, Matthew Kassel reported for Jewish Insider.

Photo Insert: During the June 2019 meeting in Osaka, Trump’s fawning efforts to develop a warmer relationship with Putin were rebuffed by the Russian president at every turn.

Following a tense exchange in which Putin had bragged of acquiring “hypersonic missiles” before the US, Trump countered with a characteristically self-centered boast.

Trump boasted his popularity outside the US was so strong that Poland was planning a military base in his name called Fort Trump while Israel, he gloated, had just recently announced a new settlement, “Trump Heights,” in appreciation of his administration’s decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Putin was unfazed. “Maybe they should just name Israel after you, Donald,” he said witheringly, shattering the bloated ego of Trump and cutting him down to size.

In many ways, the cutting remark was characteristic of the way Putin treats his underlings at the Kremlin, from the “silovoki” or security officials close to him to generals who cannot divine what the Russian dictator really wants.

The cutting exchange is one of several previously unreported details from “The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021,” a vivid account of the former president’s norm-shattering tenure written by the husband-and-wife reporting team of Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker.

The book — an advance copy of which was obtained by Jewish Insider on Wednesday — is published by Doubleday and will come out on Sept. 20.

During the June 2019 meeting in Osaka, Trump’s fawning efforts to develop a warmer relationship with Putin were rebuffed by the Russian president at every turn, according to Baker and Glasser.

“For all of Trump’s school-boy crush on Putin, aides could not help noticing that it did not appear reciprocated,” the authors recounted.

“Where other autocrats like Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kim Jong-un figured out how to stroke Trump’s ego during their meetings, Putin never bothered to try. “He gave the impression to American aides watching their interactions that he couldn’t care less about winning Trump over,” Baker and Glasser write of Putin.

“It was all a one-way street. Trump, they thought, seemed so inexplicably anxious for the Russian leader’s approval, yet never got it.”

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