NPR—a hard left outlet that we, the taxpayers, thankfully no longer must support—breathlessly reported that “Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal new details of Trump-Putin summit.” The implication was that an out-of-control, incompetent Trump administration left national secrets in the open. In fact, what was left behind on a hotel printer was a schedule, a menu of a meal that never took place, a seating chart, and a few other papers relating to the catering mechanics of the meeting. The only “sensitive information” was people’s phone numbers, and that was indeed careless.

Nevertheless, the pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump response to the menu was both hilarious and enlightening because it highlights the complete irrationality behind taking a hardline position against ending the war.

The food served sounds nice, like the kind you’d find at a Midwestern country club:

The papers also contained the full menu of the- cancelled! -lunch “in honor of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin”. Green salad with champagne vinaigrette, sourdough bread with lemon–rosemary butter, filet mignon with brandy–peppercorn sauce or halibut,… pic.twitter.com/dqkbW7m9IE

— Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) August 16, 2025

I’m a little envious, because I really like sourdough bread and a good creme brûlée (although the ice cream with the creme brûlée is overkill). Still, shorn of the fancy wording, the meal is a salad, a choice of a nice cut of steak or fish, and a custard with ice cream. It’s a decent meal to offer a man who is both the leader of a major nation and a party to an important negotiation, but it’s not Kobe beef, Beluga caviar, matsutake mushrooms, Kopi Luwak coffee (the kind that comes out of civet butts), or any other ridiculously expensive food.

However, for those in the anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine camp, this menu was a bridge too far:

They were going to serve the war criminal Filet Mignon, Halibut Olympia and Crème Brûlée — paid for by American taxpayers.

If you’re a red-blooded American patriot, this should piss you off. pic.twitter.com/dq60AriPAN

— Heath Mayo (@HeathMayo) August 17, 2025

Putin dined on Filet Mignon on our dime while Americans can't afford ground beef.https://t.co/6oTicjmXkv pic.twitter.com/NDIEoV66aD

— GWestCoast (@Caliluvv93) August 16, 2025

It never happened but @NPR got the menu for the Putin luncheon - nice spread on the American dime for a war criminal https://t.co/38jcfBtv8z pic.twitter.com/zF78NGyqLz

— Jonathan Martin (@jmart) August 16, 2025

I’m willing to bet that many of the people now fulminating about a seating chart and a menu on a printer were less upset when it emerged that Hillary Clinton ran her entire State Department through an unsecured server set up in her bathroom.

But the real point is that these people do not understand how negotiations, especially Trump’s style of negotiations, work, and that this isn’t the end of WWII, complete with an unconditional surrender.

Clearly, the Russia and Trump haters imagined that the ideal negotiation would take place with Putin chained to a chair like a criminal in custody and fed stale bread and slimy water, while Trump hurled insults and threats at him. That’s not how any negotiations work, especially Trump’s. Trump negotiates affably. As we’ve seen repeatedly, he praises the person on the other side of the table in public and is invariably polite.

Foolish people view these courtesies as a sign of weakness. Instead, it is Trump’s version of an iron fist in a velvet glove. Behind the pleasant demeanor is a shark who—genially—gets good deals for himself. And, when he’s negotiating on behalf of the United States of America, he gets good deals for the American people.

It’s that second part that people are forgetting. The U.S., despite funding Ukraine’s weapons, is not a combatant in this war. Instead, Trump is acting as a broker in a war that’s a stalemate. There is no total victory in this war.

Putin has an unlimited number of men (because that’s how Russians wage war), but not unlimited money. Ukraine has European and American money (although Europeans are loath to pay to fund what they claim is an existential threat), but the Ukrainians are done with war, having lost a huge chunk of their population to casualties and mass emigration.

If you cannot get a total victory through unconditional surrender, all that’s left is a negotiated end to the war—and a negotiation between two parties, each of which has competing strengths and weaknesses, is always going to end with each ceding something to the other. It’s deeply unsatisfactory to all involved, and to their partisans, but what’s even more unsatisfactory is a continued destabilizing bloodbath.

Image created using Grok.