Putin Got Everything He Wanted

What did Trump get?

I was watching Trump meet with Putin the way you watch a dog sniff at an electric socket: fascinated, slightly horrified, and dimly aware that if something went wrong, it would be both catastrophic and oddly satisfying. The commentators on television kept talking about “historic optics” and “geopolitical shifts,” while I sat there on my couch, fascinated by Putin’s face filler. Between him and Trump, it felt like a contest to see who could be more visually exhausting. Both men are exceptionally hard to look at — one too smooth, the other too sagging — like two wax figures left too close to a space heater.

Trump, of course, looked like he was actively decaying — slumping and bloated in a way that suggested the Big Macs were finally winning. There he was, shaking Putin’s hand as though it might suddenly turn into a novelty buzzer. And when it was all over, he declared to Fox News that Zelenskyy — poor Zelenskyy — was the one who now had to “get it done.” The phrase was repeated with such confidence you’d think “it” was a minor plumbing repair rather than the survival of a sovereign country.

I couldn’t help but imagine Zelenskyy, sitting in Kyiv, hearing this clip and pausing like I did when my dentist once told me I had “a lot of interesting teeth.” What do you even do with that? Do you thank them? Cry? Pretend it’s normal?