Does Trump Know How Much Putin Makes Fun Of Him To His Face?
Somebody should tell him, repeatedly!
Yesterday, sack-sniffing National Security Advisor Mike Waltz went on “Fox & Friends” and told host Lawrence Jones — one of the two hosts, the other being Brian Kilmeade, who at all times has this confused look on his face like a cartoon piano just fell on his head — that it is “COMPLETELY FALSE GARBAGE FAKE NEWS” that Vladimir Putin kept Donald Trump waiting for hours for their big scheduled phone call this week.
“Donald J. Trump does not sit and wait for an hour for any head of state,” he insisted, pretending other heads of state respect Trump.
Buuuuuut there is video of Putin, at a conference, being reminded that he’s way late for his call with Trump, waving it off and laughing, and everybody in the audience laughing along with him too.
You do not need to speak Russian to understand what is happening in this clip, but there are subtitles anyway:
It’s long been known that making people wait is one of Putin’s dominance moves, and Putin is certainly alpha dog over his little bitch Trump. Newsweek notes that Putin did the very same thing earlier this month to Steve Witkoff, the random-ass clown real estate developer Trump has made his Middle East envoy, and also his unofficial envoy to the Kremlin. Eight hours that time. (Trump, a pathological liar, said that’s fake news.)
So that’s Putin, not just doing his dominance move, but also publicly making fun of Trump in front of all his Russian friends, in Russian, and also in the universal language of laughing after you say “Trump.”
That’s pee-tape-grade humiliating.
And according to Trump 1.0 impeachment witness and former Trump administration Russia expert Fiona Hill, Putin is well-known for making fun of Trump, right to his face, in Russian. And he has no idea, because he’s stupid, he’s unprepared, and he has zero people around him with the knowledge or expertise — or courage — to tell him.
Good to keep in mind while Mr. Art of the Deal tries to “negotiate” the end of the war in Ukraine, while we watch Putin play Trump like a fiddle and keep the war going just like he likes it.
The other day, Hill appeared on a podcast for Foreign Affairs with Dan Kurtz-Phelan, and if you want to spend an hour on the treadmill listening, we’d recommend it. But this passage really jumped out at us. Hill is speaking about language:
“The very first time I was in one of the phone calls with Putin, I was listening very carefully to the Russian, because the interpreters don’t always capture everything. They don’t capture the nuances. And particularly when it’s the Russian interpreter, who’s translating into a language that’s also not their native language, all kinds of things are missing. And Trump said, ‘What a great conversation.’ I thought, actually, not really. There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said. He chooses words very carefully.
“Many times when Putin and Trump are interacting, Putin’s actually making fun of him. It’s just completely lost in the translation. I can give lots of episodes of this. Or he’s goading him and urging him onto something because he’s trying to see how he will react. And the translation smooths over all of that. That context is absolutely missing. And he doesn’t do a readout afterwards.”
Vladimir Putin speaks perfect English, of course. (Pause to imagine Trump trying to learn to speak another language. Squatting on his toilet doing his Duolingo.)
But in Russian, Putin makes fun of Trump to his face. Because Trump is the laughingstock of the world, whether he’s with leaders who are supposed to be our allies or leaders who are supposed to be our adversaries.
Hill makes her own fun of Trump’s thirstiness toward Putin, how Trump so fervently believes that he and Putin have been though so much “together,” likening it to a “teenage romance where everybody’s been trying to keep them apart, and he just wants to get back together with Putin in spite of everybody.”
And she shares a specific example of Putin making fun of Trump to his face, without Trump knowing it:
“Well, one of the classics was in Osaka at the G-20, which is also another famous incident where the Russians swapped out the interpreter for a very attractive, very skilled young woman. During that moment, they were standing off and chest-beating about who had hypersonic missiles first. And Trump was saying he would get them, and Putin was basically somewhat sarcastically saying, ‘Yes, you will, but I’ve got them first,’ kind of thing.
“And then they started talking about Israel. And we did have this really amazing, historic meeting among the national security advisers of Israel, Russia, and the United States. It came around this time, because at that point, the Russians were trying to make the case that they were protecting Israel and being supportive of Israel by being in the Golan Heights and the activities that were doing in Syria.
“And Putin was talking about this, and then Trump said, ‘Ah, but I do more for Israel than anybody else. They’ve named this after me and that after me in Israel.’ And Putin looked at him and said, ‘Well, Donald, perhaps they should name the country after you.’ And the way that he said it in Russian, it was so sarcastic. And you could see his guys around him smirking. But when the interpreter, who was the only person that Trump was looking at, basically said it, it just came out as more — sort of softer. And Trump responded and said, ‘Oh, no, I think that would be too much,’ almost as if it was a genuine suggestion.”
LOL, that’s so sad. The nuances of language are important!
Hill references language several times throughout the podcast, and it’s one of her main criticisms of what went wrong in that Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “He shouldn’t have been speaking in English.” What he needed was to speak in Ukrainian, with a really, really good interpreter. “It was moving very fast. And even for a native English speaker, it would have been hard to keep on the game. His English is good, but it’s not native. And that’s 101 in diplomacy. You don’t have an interaction no matter how good you are in your non-native language.” She felt Zelenskyy just wasn’t really prepared for that Oval Office encounter.
Likewise, Trump every time he speaks to Putin. He doesn’t understand the need for interpreters. She notes that all Putin’s people also “speak impeccable English and they know all their talking points.” Therefore, she said, “All of this is amateur hour because it kind of means that you’re not really fully cognizant of what it is that the Russians have said beyond what you’ve taken on board from their talking points.”
Again, the full podcast is a great and illuminating way to spend an hour. She talks about how excited they really are in Russia about having Trump in full lipstick-out mode, begging at Putin’s feet. But also she gets into what Russia might be the slightest bit uneasy about, “kind of feeling that maybe they’re the dog that caught the car” here, and what it might actually look like for Ukraine to become a failed state between Russia and Europe, with the United States as a non-actor. (Europe at war with Russia, and also China and Iran and North Korea, that’s what she says it looks like. Cue the new nuclear arms race!)
There’s discussion of what an actual end to the war might look like, if Putin were even amenable to that, and how President Arty McDeals might not actually have the power he thinks he has to force Ukraine to give Putin everything Ukraine’s Russian and American enemy leaders want:
“[A]lthough the Russians have been very clear on what they want, I do not believe that Trump has the ability to give them everything that they want and to force other people to give up things, because everything is going to be a concession for Ukraine, and everything’s also going to be a concession for Europe. And again, a cease-fire is one thing, but resolving all of the issues on this is something else. And it may be that lots of Americans may believe that Russia has a right to a sphere of influence, but a heck of a lot of Europeans certainly don’t believe that, particularly when it comes to them being in the sphere of influence.”
Also tons about where Europe must now go from here, what Putin wants next, whether Trump, Putin, and Xi in China could really carve the world up into spheres of influence without the rest of the entire world using bombs to tell them to fuck themselves, and so much more.
But the point, which we made at the top, is that Vladimir Putin mocks Trump to his face, he mocks him behind his back, and he mocks him on live TV in front of audiences of Russians.
What’s it like to be the true laughingstock of the world? Donald Trump would know if he ever experienced one millisecond of true self-awareness.
And we reckon after that we’d never see his face in public again.
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When Jimmy Carter was President, he gave a speech in Japan that an interpreter translated into Japanese for the audience. At one point Carter told an anecdote that he wasn't sure was going to get a laugh due to the translation, but the audience laughed.
After the speech, he asked the translator how he had managed to make the translation. The translator hedged, until he admitted he told the audience, "The President has told a funny story, everybody please laugh."
He lacks the capacity to be self-aware. Like a desk. Or a turnip. Or slime mold.