Trump And Putin: Pictures worth a thousand words

By Georgie Anne Geyer

As we think back on the G-20 summit of world leaders in Hamburg, we recall everyone speculating as to whether presidents Trump and Putin "liked" each other. And did the American president push Moscow hard enough on the hacking of our elections?

I have a different question for both men: Didn't you have mothers who taught you to sit up straight?

Look at the pictures from their little private meeting on July 7 and one sees them both crouched over ominously, like simians leaning forward with their arms hanging loose, as though they were going to pounce on some poor creature. They never smile. Indeed, their eyes stare down, as though discouraging anyone who might disturb them.

Perhaps they are only in a Hollywood mood, pretending they are Mafia dons out of "The Godfather." Or perhaps at least one of them really is.

Rather than two men who "lead," which means to guide, to govern and to rule, they look like two men who "order," which means to command, to mandate, to dictate.

The scene reminds one to look back at the photos of the Yalta Conference in February 1945. At that crucial World War II meeting on the Black Sea, dominating Churchill was sitting with his usual command of the occasion; ailing Roosevelt, though bundled in his protective cape against the cold, projected the very soul of dignity; evil Stalin, only the slightest of grins occasionally touching his lips, was probably thinking about how many of his countrymen he had killed that day.

Yet they were all sitting up straight.

And at the G-20 meeting last week, photos of other leaders revealed straight backs, too.

Germany's Angela Merkel sat with her legs casually crossed, unfussily confident about being in charge of her house. The Argentine leader posed artistically, and the Australian had a pleasantly no-nonsense demeanor about him. Perhaps most important, Chinese President Xi Jinping leaned back with an unchanging Buddha smile, seemingly at home with the (other) leaders of the "free world."

President Trump came home to new Russia scandals. But, especially after the G-20, the issue is not really about meetings; it is that Trump and his people identify with the Russians - and like them so much!

Why?

The wise foreign affairs columnist Anne Applebaum wrote after the summit in The Washington Post about Russian money. "We do know that Russian money flooded into New York real estate ... over the past 15 years. ... We know that Trump, among others, did deals with many people who had Russian or ex-Soviet connections. We also know that he has admired Putin for many years, perhaps because Putin used money to win political power and then used political power to make money."

And neither presidents Obama nor Bush "understood the subtle ways in which a large, kleptocratic, semi-criminal state on Europe's borders could threaten Western stability."

Masha Gessen, the brilliant Russian-born biographer of Putin, wrote in The New York Times of the "conditions" that bind such men as Trump and Putin: "ignorance" about the world, a "love of power and grandeur," "shared prejudice" (mainly against Muslims), an "inability or an unwillingness to distinguish fact from fiction" and "moral neutrality."

Vladimir Putin is, of course, a real killer, disciplined and single-minded; Trump is only a hypothetical one, a rough man driven by social resentment against Fifth Avenue New Yorkers, and a guy who kills deals. Yet the two meet in the field of the unmannered slouch.

The meanness, the debasement of others, the cruelty toward the weak, the refusal of all of the best virtues of the West: It's all there, behind those photos. Putin hates the West and yet yearns to be equal to it; Trump grew up hating those "other" New Yorkers on Fifth Avenue and in Newport, and put into practice his father Fred's injunction to be a "killer" and not a "loser."

But Americans should realize that, whatever Trump is really thinking or feeling, the events of June in Hamburg meant that, for many in the world, an American president effectively allied himself and his clan with Russia; he walked out of that strange jungle meeting looking like a leader with a Third World mindset that everyone across the globe could see.

Australia's ABC called the American president "an uneasy, awkward and lonely figure on the world scene," and that is a good description. Still, lurking in the back of our minds is the fearful question as to whether "The Donald" is an aberration in American politics - or whether he IS us.

But that's a question for another day.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

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