Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Shameful “Summit” Was Even Worse Than We Thought

Episode Date: August 16, 2025

Tim Miller takes on how the Trump-Putin Alaska summit went from what seemed to be an empty nothing-burger to a grotesque betrayal as it’s now being reported Trump pushed Putin’s demands onto Zelenskyy that Ukraine give up Donetsk and Luhansk. Financial Times’ report, “Putin demanded Ukraine cede Donetsk and Luhansk in exchange for freezing rest of front line“

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwork here. We've learned more about what was happening behind the scenes at the Trump-Pooten Summit, if you want to call it that, in Alaska. And it turns out it was even a more humiliating betrayal than it seemed last night.

And it seemed pretty humiliating last night. So let's just back up for folks who missed it. There was a joint statement, I guess. It was a very Russia-style joint statement following the meeting where Putin talked, followed by Trump talking last night. I gave a live reaction to that. The main takeaway from that was that it was kind of a shocking nothing burger. Like, you know, they both flattered each other.

Putin gets a win just being able to be there and be treated as an equal and to have Trump compliment him and have Trump lie about the Russia hoax. The Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia hoax that made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he's probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He's seen it all. You know, et cetera, et cetera. Putin gets to air his grievances with Ukraine and with the West. We've always considered the Ukrainian nation and have said it multiple times, a brother of nation, how strange it may sound.

And so, you know, but there wasn't anything of substance. And it seemed, as of Friday night, that maybe this meeting was just a big zero. You know, it was kind of one of those meetings. It could have been an email-type meetings. Since then, we have learned what was being discussed behind the scenes. where Trump and Putin said they made progress. And it is, you know, maybe not a worst case scenario for Ukraine,

but about as close to a worst case scenario as you can get. And just a total appalling betrayal by the United States, by Trump and Rubio and Wickcoff. So Trump had an insult to injury, probably the most grotesque part of this whole debacle, happened during Trump's interview with Sean Hannity after the summit. But to understand just how badly Trump treated Zelensky during that meeting with Hannity, it's important to kind of understand the backstory that we didn't know last night about what Putin had been asking for in the meeting.

So this reporting comes from the FT. So shout out to those guys, Christopher Miller, Amy McKinnon, Max Sedan over there. And their headline Putin demanded Ukraine seed Donetsk and Lou Hansk in exchange for freezing the rest of the front line. I want to read a little bit to you from this story. So Trump communicated Putin's demands in a message to Zelensky on his flight back from Alaska, as well as a call to European leaders here earlier this morning on Saturday. And he urged them on that call to work on a deal, the contours of which are somewhat around what Putin is asking for here. So for context, Donetsk and Lujansk are in the east.

Russia right now controls about 70% of Donetsk. So they'd be asking Ukraine to give up parts of the region that they don't even control. Trump advancing Putin's propaganda again, Russian propaganda expressed that Putin told him that just getting the rest of Donetsk could be easy for them. It wouldn't be a big deal. And they could just do that. if they wanted to. That makes no sense, obviously, to anybody who, I don't know, has a brain, follows the news, et cetera, would realize that Putin has been trying to occupy Donetsk for like a decade plus now.

And if it was that easy, he would have just done it. So anyway, once again, just even in his little random asides, Trump is always like beefing up Putin and advancing his talking points. and, you know, tearing down Zelensky. So Putin wants Donetsky and in addition to that, they'd freeze the front line in the southern part of the country in Kersan and other surrounding areas where Putin already occupies large parts of the land. And then on top of that, Putin wanted once again to resolve what he calls the root causes of the conflict. Now, I'll just pause on this for a second because I noticed even some of the commenters. Here at the bulwark were pushing back on my mockery of Putin's, you know, talking points around the root causes of this war.

You know, I think there's a lot of people, I guess, have succumbed to Russian propaganda and believe that this war was started because, you know, Ukraine was, you know, playing footsie with NATO too aggressively or because Ukraine's skirt was a little too short and they were asking for it. The West had too many weapons in, in Eastern Europe. And it's just, it's all baloney. It's all fucking nonsense. The root cause of this war is that Vladimir Putin is a maniac. Vladimir Putin is a homicidal megalomaniac who wants to re-engineer the USSR. He wants to colonize. the many of his neighboring countries and he wants to do as much of that as he can get away with

to get power for himself and to feed his ego and so he can see himself as this great leader who brought Russia back, you know, to prominence or whatever. That is it. The root causes war is inside Vladimir Putin's mania. Like that is it. If Vladimir Putin just left, just told his troops to go home, the war would be over. There's no other root cause. There's nothing. Nobody else did anything to make this happen. So I reject this. What Putin means when he's talking about root cause is he doesn't want Ukraine to have self-government anymore, basically. It wants Ukraine to have limits on on what kind of alliances they can have, military and economic with the West. He wants other countries in the West to withdraw, various

military assets from the region, and he wants to get other kind of assurances that some future Ukrainian leader will not decide that they want to determine the future of their country. Some freely elected leader doesn't want to direct Ukraine to the West. as they would have the right to do because they have the right to self-government. They're not a Russia puppet state. So essentially creating Ukraine as a Russia puppet state where Ukraine nominally controls, you know, whatever parts of the country that currently control Kiev, etc., is Putin's demand. It is a preposterous demand.

It's an insane demand. If Marco Rubio still had any guts, still had any cahones, still was the man that he was when I ran a campaign against him in 2016. He would tell Vladimir Putin to go pound sand. Our demand is that you leave Ukraine and don't come back. And then maybe we'll let you trade your oil with other countries so you don't go broke. That is the grounds that this debate should be happening on. So anyway, that's not where we are.

So now we've laid out what Putin said. Now we know, thanks to this reporting. wants the battle lines to freeze, plus he wants additional territory in the eastern part of Ukraine, plus he wants to ensure that Ukraine does not have self-government in the future. That's it. They can spin it or talk about, you know, give other types of descriptions about what they mean when they mean root causes,

but they don't want Ukraine to have self-government to be able to determine the future for themselves. Like that's the demand. and that shitshan, which has been dropped on Zelensky's plate. Now, we get back to Donald Trump. After that meeting, where Donald Trump said they made progress, what is Putin giving up again exactly? It's unclear. His ambitions to continue territorial expansion, I guess.

Trump said they made progress. After that, he does an interview with Handy, where he says this about what the next steps are. Here are a lot of points. I mean, a lot of points we're agreeing on, So there's not that much as, you know, one or two pretty significant items, but I think they can be reached. Now it's really up to President Zelensky to get it done. And I would also say the European nations, they have to get involved a little bit.

But it's up to President Zelensky. I think we are, and if they'd like, I'll be at that next meeting. They're going to set up a meeting now between President Zelensky and President Putin. And myself, I guess, you know, I didn't even, I didn't ask you about it. Not that I want to be there, but I want to make sure it gets done. And we have a pretty good chance of getting it done. Now it's up to Zelensky to get it done? To get what done?

To give up his country? You want Zelensky to just get prostrate on the ground like you made American soldiers do for Putin? That's what you want? What do you mean? It's up to Zelensky to get it done? No. No. No.

No. It's up to you to. to support our ally, to strengthen our ally, so that Putin realizes that he can't just invade free countries and exert his will over them. That is the next step. That's what this should be. It is sick and grotesque that Trump would like try to trade away some of Ukraine and trade away its ability to self-governed in the future and then be like, Zelensky, it's up to you

to take that deal, take it or leave, it close the deal. No, fuck you. No, no, no. We're right back to where we were in the Oval Office meeting, that shameful overall office meeting where it's Trump and Vance, pressuring Zelensky, you need to make concessions, you need to give stuff up so that Donnie can get his peace prize. That's where we're at. We're going to pressure our ally.

We're going to condescend to them and intimidate them and pressure them so Trump can get some sort of win, some sort of trophy. And we're going to suck up and sidle up to our enemy, our foe, who should be our foe, who was the aggressor in the war. That's where we're at. That's what the leader of the free world is doing. Sick. Sorry, we all know that Friedrich Mertz is the leader of the free world now. I apologize.

This whole thing is just so pathetic. And the next step now is Zelensky's coming back, reported. to America. I guess the next step is the coalition of the willing, as they call it, which is the people besides America, the European countries that are still willing to, you know, defend their territory. They're having a discussion today. I assume Trump will have some surrogates out doing interviews tomorrow on Sunday morning and we'll see what their posture is and whether it reflects this reporting. And then supposedly on Monday afternoon, Zelensky is going to come to D.C. and we'll meet with Trump. You know, who knows? Hopefully that goes better than the last

time. We gave you, through the stupid president, $350 billion, we gave you military equipment, and you met a brave, but they had to use our military. If you didn't have our military, I don't know. There's much reason to hope. The only reason I could think of to have any optimism about that is that sometimes Trump does, just kind of do whatever the last person that talked to him said he should do. He has that habit. But it's in a bad play. I don't know Zolensky has any other option, though, except to try that and see if that works this time. So we'll see just a display in Alaska that went from kind of humiliating pathetic Nothing Burger to just a total grotesque betrayal of everything that America should stand for. And, you know, really kind of not too, not, it turns out too dissimilar from Trump's behavior in Helsinki back in 2018.

President Putin, he just said it's not Russia. I will say this. I don't see any reason why it would be. So that's where we're at. We'll monitor the Sunday shows, as I mentioned, if there's anything interesting, we'll bring that to you tomorrow. If any other news breaks on this over the weekend,

I or one of my colleagues will be back to talk to you about it. Appreciate you all for watching. Tell your friends, fuck Donald Trump. We'll see you all soon.