From Russia With Love (Notes)

A Field Guide to Trump's Most Desperate Handshake

Trump was buzzing for days. The world’s media was hyped, headlines screaming about the “meeting of the century.” And our Donny? He was practically vibrating, like a kid told Disneyland, and his meet and greet with Spider-Man is only one more sleep away.

The man who always looks like me in July 1988, when I thought slathering self-tanning cream on during a long-haul flight would make me “glow” on arrival. Spoiler: I glowed. In neon orange. I stepped off that plane to meet relatives I’d never seen before, all of them frozen in disbelief, mouths open, eyes wide, wondering if I’d been marinated in pumpkin soup. That’s Trump’s official skin tone. Orange not as an accident or the result of bad lighting, but as a lifestyle.
So he flew to Alaska, expecting Daddy Putin to take him to the playground. Instead, Daddy handed him a skipping rope and watched patiently as his son tripped over it.

We’re eight months into this man’s presidency. Eight months after promising he’d end the Ukraine war in twenty-four hours. 24 hours. One day. He said he’d wrap it up faster than you get your TEMU delivery. And here we are: 5,760 hours later, and we still stare at the door waiting for the deliveryman, but no package has arrived. There is no peace deal, no victory parade, just a grown man onstage in Anchorage in awe of his own orchestrated self-importance, grinning at the world’s cruellest dictator. This is the moment I wish Teddy Roosevelt would reappear, stomping up the stage in his boots, ripping the mic from Trump’s hands, and reminding him that America was built on grit, not grifting. One swing of that Rough Rider fist and the orange glow would be knocked clean off his face.

Picture it: Anchorage. The air so sharp you can taste the ice. Flags stiff in the wind, microphones humming, the bomber flyover irritating …. no one. Not even the moose. This was supposed to be his coronation moment. The dealmaker of the century. The man who could do in a day what NATO, the EU, and Ukraine combined couldn’t in years. History was supposed to kneel. The cameras were supposed to weep. The crowd was supposed to chant his name like salvation.

And then Daddy Putin arrived. Heavy, cold, smirk carved from stone. The kind of smirk that says, “I already know how this joke ends.”

Trump beams. The kid who only studied one word for the spelling bee: his own name. He promised 24 hours. Eight months later, he’s still waiting for Daddy to tell him which crayon to use. Instead of a deal, he gets a rope. “Here, champ, skip a bit. Show the nice man from Moscow how high you can hop.”

Daddy Issues

Trump doesn’t just admire Putin. He romanticises him. Calls him a “beautiful man.” Not strong. Not ruthless. Not cunning. Beautiful. The word slips out of his mouth with that heavy, desperate tone, like a teenager describing their crush after the swimming lesson.

But beauty is relative.

Beautiful like parts of Syria, flattened into ash.

Beautiful like the way journalists keep discovering gravity from their own apartment windows.

Beautiful like a law that tells battered women their bruises are a private hobby.

Beautiful like the black SUVs idling outside your workplace, engines humming louder than your heartbeat.

Beautiful like silencing a nation with fear, then selling that silence as “greatness.”

That’s the beauty Trump sees: cruelty with clean edges. Strength is measured not by what you build, but by how efficiently you destroy. Masculinity stripped to its most toxic core, vodka, fists, denial, rebranded as “greatness.”

And of course, he loves it. Trump is a connoisseur of the bully. Always has been. He was the schoolyard kid who didn’t admire the teacher; he admired the kid who tripped you, stole your lunch, and made you thank him for the honour. He doesn’t worship power for what it accomplishes; he worships the freedom power gives you to avoid consequences.

That’s why he calls Putin “beautiful.” Because Putin is the living embodiment of Trump’s greatest fantasy: impunity.

He doesn’t envy Putin’s discipline, or his icy KGB poker face. He envies that Putin can make people vanish, flatten regions, rewrite laws, and then step onto the stage with applause instead of indictments. Trump has tried his whole life to buy that same applause with gold paint and lawsuits, but deep down, he knows it’s fake. Putin’s is real. Putin has what Trump wants: fear dressed as respect.

And when Trump sits across from him in Anchorage, glowing like a schoolgirl on Barbie day, the adoration leaks out. The adjectives get sticky. Beautiful, very beautiful, the most beautiful man.

The Babysitter Theory

Maybe it isn’t admiration at all. Maybe Daddy isn’t beautiful. Maybe Daddy is the babysitter. The one with the diaper bag. The one with the drawer labelled SECRETS.

Not medals. Not family photos. Not cufflinks. A drawer that smells faintly of printer toner, cologne, and very expensive silence. That’s where Putin keeps his leverage. And when Trump waddles into the room, Putin doesn’t see a fellow statesman. He sees a client. He sees a file. He sees a baby with a messy diaper, waiting for a change.

Imagine it: the world watching what they think is a summit, when in reality it’s a changing table. Putin straps Donny down, opens the drawer, and sighs. Yes, this one’s messy too. The Russians call it kompromat. In English, we just call it babysitting.

Because what else explains it? The way Trump’s smile gets wider when Putin’s smirk gets sharper. The way the strongest man in the world suddenly looks like a child who just handed over his pocket money to the neighbourhood bully. He doesn’t just respect him; he obeys him. He leans in when Putin speaks, nodding like a toddler in church, trying to show he understands the sermon, but he keeps lying anyway.

And the sickest part? He seems to like it. He seems to like being disciplined. He seems to like Daddy knowing more than him, seems to like that secret drawer, seems to like the idea that Putin could ruin him with a flick of his wrist, because it means Putin sees him. Attention is love in Trump’s head. Fear is affection. Humiliation is intimacy.

So while Ukraine burns, while NATO holds its breath, while Zelenskyy watches his supposed ally fall in line like a cheap hooker, Trump is happy, because Daddy is babysitting. Daddy’s still in the room. Daddy hasn’t walked away.

And America? America might be paying the most expensive childcare service bill in history.

The Summit as a School Play

If you thought this was a summit, I think you’re wrong. What I saw was more of a school play. Badly staged, under-rehearsed, with half the cast forgetting their lines and the other half forgetting why they were onstage at all.

Scene one: the props. The Americans left their own summit documents in a hotel printer. Not just doodles or schedules, no, the full package. Phone numbers. Draft agendas. “Luncheon in honour of His Excellency Vladimir Putin.” Like a student forgetting their homework on the kitchen table, only this time the homework contained the answers to foreign policy. The only machine that worked on time in Anchorage that day was the Xerox.

Scene two: the script. What was meant to be a brisk, disciplined forty-minute meeting somehow bloats into nearly three hours. Not because the talks were deep. Because the stage kept filling with more actors. The neat two-on-two became a clumsy three-on-three. You could feel the energy of a parent-teacher conference where nobody did the reading. Putin sat there like the principal, Trump like the kid who swore the dog ate his sanctions policy.

Scene three: the missing sandwich. The “working lunch” never happened. No handshake over soup, no signing papers over salmon. Which is tragic, because if there’s one area where Trump has ever shown executive experience, it’s lunch. He didn’t get his lunch, but he did get lectured. And he smiled through it, like the boy who still thinks the teacher might give him a gold star if he just sits still long enough.

Finale: the curtain call. A twelve-minute press appearance. No questions. Just a few vague lines, muttered like stage directions read aloud. Diplomacy by shrug, in HD.

The Dictator Love Story

History has its bromances. Look up Rome, 1938. Hitler and Mussolini strutting through the Eternal City like peacocks in borrowed uniforms. Arm in arm, chin up, waving at crowds that had no idea their applause was buying them rubble. They called it destiny. They called it greatness. They called it the dawn of a new order. We know how it ended: ruins, ration cards, and decades of shame. The golden days of strongmen always end in grey dust.

And now here we are again, only cheaper. The remake. The B-movie version was shot on location in Anchorage, Alaska. Instead of Roman ruins, we’ve got moose looking confused in the parking lot. Instead of marble steps, folding chairs on a stage that looks like it was rented for an AA meeting. Instead of history, a press release.

Trump looks at Putin the way Mussolini looked at Hitler: with that mix of awe and desperation, like a man who knows he’s not the lead in this film but is praying he still gets a close-up. Putin, like Hitler, doesn’t have to look back. He knows he’s the senior partner. He knows the other dude is there for validation, not partnership.

And the audience? Republicans clap like extras who’ve been promised minors if they just keep nodding. Democrats groan like critics forced to review the sequel to a flop they already hated. Ukrainians watch in horror, Europe in disbelief, Russia in jubilation.

Anchorage isn’t Rome. It doesn’t even have the architecture for a good dictatorship photo op. But the energy is the same: two men pretending history is applauding, when in fact history is sharpening its pencil, ready to file them under “mistakes.”

The Cult of Decline

Once upon a time, America put men on the moon. Now, half the country isn’t sure if the moon is even real. That’s the trajectory. From Apollo to TikTok flat-earth explainers in under sixty years. Progress in reverse.

Look at the scoreboard. Once the richest, most confident democracy in the world, now proudly leading the West in categories normally reserved for failing states:

Most unvaccinated population. Because memes beat medicine. Why trust doctors when your cousin’s Facebook post says garlic and bleach cure everything?

Education stalled at a sixth-grade reading level. Perfect, because that’s exactly the literacy you need to follow a Trump speech. Coincidence? No, it’s product design.

Science is treated like witchcraft. Libraries are attacked because books contain “dangerous ideas.” Dangerous, as in “math.”

Religion is running the show. A nation with a nuclear arsenal runs like a megachurch bake sale. Pastors preaching questionable policy, congregations cheering legislation they’ll never read, the guy in the sky is polling higher than the Supreme Court.

Healthcare collapse. An industrialised country where getting sick is a financial decision. The ambulance ride comes with an itemised bill and a “thank you for your service” discount code.

Conspiracy culture mainstreamed. Elites (only democratic ones!) drink blood that they harvested from children to gain eternal youth and divine power, the deep state is hiding under your bed, and vaccines turn you into Bill Gates’s WiFi router.

This is what “great again” looks like: willful ignorance as national pride. America has made a parody of itself. A country that once manufactured cars and steel now manufactures paranoia and podcasts. A country where the people once believed in tomorrow now stockpiles canned beans for the rapture.

And they clap while it happens. They call it freedom. They wear their decline like a visibility jacket. Trump beams at them, tells them they’re beautiful, and they come closer to the light to glow even better. Because nothing makes you feel more alive than being told your decay is wanted by the LORD.

The Sheep & the Showman

Here’s the trick: Donald Trump doesn’t govern, he grifts, lies, corrupts and threatens. And the flock? They’re not citizens anymore. They’re customers in the world’s longest, dumbest infomercial of all time. Cult members in a cult where lobotomy isn’t optional— it’s the fundamental requirement.

He sells them hats. He sells them Bibles. He sells them gold watches made in China, thin as tin foil, marked up like a Manhattan penthouse, ticking only to remind you it’s time to buy a real watch. He sells them “Trump University,” which is like Hogwarts if Hogwarts taught bankruptcy law and had no graduates. He sells them casinos that couldn’t beat the house, his own house. He sells them bottled water from a tap in New Jersey. He sells them steaks that taste like the box they came in. He sells them the illusion that losing is winning, that humiliation is greatness, that obedience is freedom.

And they line up. They hand over their money, their dignity, their democracy. They buy it like it’s salvation. “But wait, there’s more! Order today and we’ll throw in a free sense of persecution. Limited time only. While supplies last, which is forever.”

He tells them they’re beautiful. Every rally, every sermon, every chant: you are beautiful. And they cry, because compliments from a conman feel like a warm hug now. It’s the new Social Security: a pat on the head and a hat on your head.

And all the while he laughs, because the only product he’s ever truly sold is himself. The cheap watch, the phoney diploma, the rancid steak, they were just test runs for the big scam: America itself.

The Dark Twist

Every time Putin and Trump meet, democracy loses a pint of blood. That’s the real show.

Because Trump doesn’t do foreign policy. He uses flattery and fear. He does whatever keeps Putin in the room. If that means echoing Kremlin talking points, fine. If that means undercutting NATO, fine. If that means stabbing Ukraine in the back while calling it peace, fine.

And the cult cheers because they think they’re watching strength. But strength isn’t what’s on display. What’s on display is dependency. A child desperate for approval. A leader so fragile he’ll burn down the house just to prove he can light a match.

That’s the horror: America isn’t being led anymore. It’s being babysat. Babysat by a strongman abroad and by a cult at home, each happy to let the republic rot if it keeps them entertained. Every meeting, every grin, every nod, another stitch in democracy’s heart.

Finale: The Alaska Gift

And if you think that’s too far, if you think the show couldn’t get darker, here’s the part where you remember what executive power means in Trump’s hands. It doesn’t mean process. It doesn’t mean law. It means whim. If he wakes up cranky, NATO gets cancelled. If Daddy Putin looks at him with a smile, sanctions vanish. And if the applause isn’t loud enough, he’ll sell the stage itself.

So why not Alaska? Why not hand the old Russian colony back as the ultimate “peace deal”? Imagine the pitch: “Nobody’s ever won the Nobel Peace Prize by giving away a state before, folks. Tremendous. Tremendous.” He could frame it as history-making generosity, the deal of all deals. Putin gets land, Trump gets headlines, the GOP gets to cheer, and the Nobel committee gets bullied into coughing up a medal.

Picture the ceremony: a windswept tarmac, folding chairs wobbling in the snow. Palin grins at the podium, wielding scissors so oversized they look borrowed from a parade float. A moose stumbles into the frame, confused but patriotic. The banner overhead screams: “Tremendous Real Estate Deal.” And Palin finally lands her final punchline, crystal-clear: “I used to say I could see Russia from my house, now I can finally hand them the keys.”

Trump puffs out his chest: “We didn’t lose Alaska, we won Russia!” The crowd roars as if dignity itself came with a coupon code. The deed slides across the table, the ink smudges, the fine print says: No returns, no refunds, all sales final.

And somewhere, William Seward, the man who bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, is spinning so hard in his grave he’s generating hydroelectric power.