The stakes are high in Anchorage.
The latest Pew Research Center poll released this week sets the stage ahead of the president’s meeting — none dare call it a “summit” — with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, amid Donald Trump’s effort to find a pathway to peace in Ukraine. Of all the foreign policy issues that have dominated his second term, voters express the least confidence in Trump’s ability to handle Russia’s war of conquest.
“Today, 40% of Americans are at least somewhat confident in Trump to make wise decisions about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, down from 45% last summer,” Pew’s analysis read. “And while 73% of Republicans express confidence today, that is down from 81% a year ago.”
That’s not a major shift, but it’s not nothing, either. And it’s informed by voters’ experience watching this mercurial administration alternate wildly from Volodymyr Zelensky antagonist to Putin skeptic — a dynamic accompanied by similarly dizzying shifts in Pentagon and State Department policy toward this conflict. Pew’s data might suggest that voters are evaluating the president on his performance rather than on what they’re told about Trump’s actions or intentions by parties invested in preserving the aura of infallibility around the president in certain right-wing quarters.
That sets high stakes for the president in Anchorage. Indeed, his administration seems inclined to allow Trump to perform a high-wire act in the Frontier State that he already botched once. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Trump and Putin would hold a joint press conference following their discussions. The last time that happened, it occasioned a cascade of Republican rebukes as the GOP’s leading lights savaged Trump for lending credence to the Russian autocrat’s claim that his regime had never interfered in American elections.
Maybe this time will be different. It had better be. Still, the president is as susceptible to flattery and suggestion as ever. It is Putin’s goal to convince Trump that Kyiv is the obstacle to peace, what with its obdurate refusal to consign more of its citizens to oppressive Russian domination and its obsessive demand for a foreign policy independent of Moscow’s. If this press conference goes off as planned, it is highly likely that Trump will have been once again convinced that the victim of this war is, in fact, its greatest villain. After all, if Putin cannot incept that impression in the president’s head, what will there be to talk about?