Putin’s Sly Ability To ‘Dupe’ American Presidents

Trump is only the latest to mistakenly consider the czar a friend.

“Vladimir Putin doesn’t want to take all of Europe … He’s not a bad guy. He’s super smart.” These pearls of wisdom aren’t from a local bartender or pro-Russian blogger, nor were they written by an online troll from Saint Petersburg’s top propaganda factory, creating fake news to influence public opinion. Unfortunately, it was Steve Witkoff, the U.S. representative in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. We say “unfortunately” because even though nobody doubts Putin’s intelligence, this doesn’t mean he’s not a bad person. You could say that Russia has a recent history rich in examples of evil geniuses, from Vladimir Lenin to Joseph Stalin, among others. Only pure ignorance or serious misjudgment of character will let you believe that Putin is not a bad person. After all, we’re talking about a man who has assassinated contemporary heroes like Anna Politkovskaya and Aleksei Navalny; individuals who dared to politically oppose him, like Boris Nemtsov and Boris Berezovsky; and the courageous Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered with radioactive polonium.

In his own country, Putin has banned freedom of expression, forcibly closing television networks, free news, and radio outlets and imprisoning hundreds of his opponents (including minors) in ways that resemble or are even worse than those during the Soviet Union. He has used ethnic division in the Donbass as an excuse to invade and devastate Ukraine for three years, giving chunks of it away to his own friends and allies. And let’s not forget the kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian youths and many more.

Donald Trump is another man who only associates with people who agree with him, quickly firing anyone who disagrees, like Keith Kellogg, Witkoff’s predecessor. Trump is also very quick, sometimes too quick, to listen to the advice of people like Curtis Yarvin, telling him to let Putin do what he wants in Europe while secretly trying to establish traditionalist regimes in European countries to bring them under the new Russo-American control. This also applies to the naive conviction that Putin doesn’t want to dominate us, something that could actually happen as a result. Yet, Trump believes he is shrewder than the old snake charmer of the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Witkoff doesn’t hesitate to follow the president’s orders to keep Putin happy. In the past, Putin has succeeded in deceiving other American presidents without going as far as he has today (“Archaeology of the present,” as Sebastiano Vassalli would say).*

Putin has an ability to hone in on his interlocutor’s weak points and flatter the person into believing Putin is a decent person, doing the utmost to hide his K.G.B. roots. Bill Clinton was the first to fall for it, and even as late as 2013 praised his “good but blunt relationship” with Putin. George W. Bush was amazed when he learned that Putin always wore the cross gifted him by first lady Barbara Bush, it being the only object to survive a fire at their family home. Bush talked about meeting Putin and that he “looked the man in the eye” and found him to be “straightforward and trustworthy.”

Trump, who has had a murky relationship with Russia since 1987, must recognize in Putin a fellow narcissist. The risk is that we Europeans will end up paying for Trump’s grave mistake of believing that he is cleverer than Putin, no matter what Witkoff says.

*Editor’s note: Sebastiano Vassalli was an Italian author who died in 2015.