Trump’s latest “fixer” gets shown up by Putin
Trump thinks of himself as a mob boss, which is appropriate, because that is in essence what he is. As such Trump always has to have a “fixer.” Somebody to do his dirty front work and dirty grunt work.
For more than a decade that fixer was the lawyer Michael Cohen. Cohen remained faithful to Trump, paid off pornstars to keep them quiescent, threatened family businesses to keep them complaisant, threatened enemies to remind them who’s boss. Then one day, as he always eventually does, Trump betrayed Cohen and sent him to prison. When Cohen was given compassionate release due to the pandemic, Trump sent him back to prison for exercising his first amendment right to author a book.
Let that be a cautionary tale to Trump’s latest fixer, Steve Witkoff. Just as JD Vance should worry about the fact that Trump thought it would be a good idea to have his previous Vice President hanged, (the wall of booing and hatred Vance received at the Lincoln Center the other night is only a foretaste), Witkoff should worry about what Trump did to his last fixer. Neither man will learn anything, of course, because both of them are stupid.
Donald “Art of the Deal” Trump sent Witkoff to Moscow to deliver the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. Just to make it clear who the real boss is, Putin made Witkoff wait 8 hours before seeing him.
This was no accident. The day before Witkoff was to come to the Kremlin, Putin hastily arranged a last minute and wholly unnecessary meeting with Belarusian leader Aleksander Lukashenko. He took his sweet time talking to and entertaining Lukashenko as a pretext to make Witkoff cool his heels in the lobby. This is a deliberate and common ploy of the murderer Putin.
Along with murdering them, Putin enjoys humiliating and inconveniencing people in general, but this time he had a specific message behind it. The message was, while Putin is glad Trump is acting as his monkey and destroying the American democracy, economy and people, he is in no way answerable to Trump. Putin is the boss.
Putin sent Witkoff home with his own message: there can be a ceasefire, but only on Vladimir Putin’s terms. Those terms include Putin getting to keep all of the land he seized thus far and Ukraine remaining out of NATO. In other words, he wants everything.
One thing Trump’s new fixer needs to learn, if he hasn’t learned it already, is that his boss isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and as a negotiator of the “art of the deal” he’s a rank amateur. Witkoff just shook hands with the real deal maker and power player in Moscow, and he was lucky to come back home with all of his fingers intact.
It should also have occurred to Witkoff that Trump sending a property salesman instead of his Secretary of State — or at least a career diplomat — to meet with the master of Moscow would be viewed as an insult,and that he was bound to return the insult in spades. But Witkoff, as already observed, is too stupid to understand any of this.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.