Anyone can insult Trump

American military personnel rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin; Trump ceremoniously stepped out to greet his guest, they gave each other a friendly pat on the shoulder, exchanged smiles, posed against the backdrop of a huge “Alaska-2025” sign, and set off for talks in the U.S. president’s limousine. No one would have been surprised if, after such a spectacle, Trump had completely caved in to Putin’s demands, sacrificing both Ukraine and his NATO allies—an alliance he had come to dislike so much.

And he did, in fact, make some concessions. A month before the summit in Anchorage, on July 14, the White House chief gave the Kremlin 50 days to cease fire and sit down at the negotiating table with Ukraine, or else sanctions would follow. On July 22, the 50-day ultimatum was repeated. It wasn’t entirely clear from which date to count—whether, as before, from the 14th, or now from the 22nd. Trump repeated the threats several more times, but after Alaska, the demand for a ceasefire as a basic condition for moving toward negotiations was dropped, and Moscow continues to remind everyone at every opportunity that the American president has strayed from the “spirit of Anchorage” and from certain promises he made—promises that Washington now stubbornly denies ever having made.

At the same time, during this entire period, the only time the U.S. imposed sanctions against Russia was last October—17 months ago—and they targeted the companies “Rosneft” and “Lukoil.” Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Christopher Coons are now asking the White House what caused such a long pause: “If the administration halted regular sanctions in favor of peace talks, and those talks reached an impasse several months ago, why hasn’t it resumed the systematic and frequent imposition of restrictions to regain leverage for a just peace in Ukraine?”

After the midterm elections, Congress will have additional opportunities to question Trump and his team. And in the year that has passed since the meeting in Anchorage, much has changed for the current administration.

Things began to visibly unravel in February, when the Supreme Court ruled that the import tariffs imposed by the president in April 2025 as part of an all-out trade war with the rest of the world were unlawful. It was a brilliant economic decision, designed to squeeze a fortune out of the rest of the world into the U.S. treasury, use that money to correct the trade deficit, restore America’s manufacturing might, and even issue every American a check for two thousand dollars. There wasn’t anywhere near that much money to be found, but even the funds that did make it into the budget now have to be returned to the affected companies. The “Trump—Economic Wizard” narrative is over.

However, right away, in February, the narrative of “Trump—the mighty warrior” emerged: Amid the euphoria following the successful abduction of Venezuelan dictator Maduro by Benjamin Netanyahu, it turned out to be no trouble at all to persuade the U.S. president to demonstrate the exceptional effectiveness of the American armed forces on a truly historic scale and,side by side with Israel to put an end, once and for all, to the regime of the black mullahs in Iran. Peace and harmony would then reign in the Middle East, and Donald’s name would be hallowed for all time! For the sake of such a prospect, the idea of “Trump as an outstanding peacemaker” was easily sacrificed—and it wasn’t taking off anyway, largely due to Putin’s intransigence. The Nobel Peace Prize flashed across the horizon of the patient’s wild fantasies and vanished.

The “Trump the Warrior” narrative seems to have turned out even worse than the “economic wizard” one. Having supposedly inflicted a crushing military defeat on Iran by all measures, Donald Trump manages to completely lose out to Iran in the political fallout from a war that shows no signs of ending and is extremely unpopular, and the accompanying blow to the American economy due to rising fuel prices is effectively burying the Republican Party’s prospects for the midterm elections in November. Trump’s approval rating is now at a record low for any U.S. president since such data began being tracked.

When the 45th president took office as the 47th, both supporters and opponents said it certainly wouldn’t be boring. But now, a year and a half has passed, and it’s already boring. No one expects anything more from Trump. He has stopped constantly shocking people; instead, he is noticeably irritating and exhausting. Even with his majority in the House and Senate, with the Justice Department ready to dance to his tune, the FBI, and a host of other federal agencies all ready to dance to his tune, and with an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, he still can’t produce any convincing results anywhere or in anything—it makes no sense to listen to his increasingly verbose and incoherentrambling speeches or read his endless posts on Truth Social, where from morning till night—and sometimes well into the night—he starts and ends wars, glorifying himself for successes depicted in images generated by artificial intelligence. It’s a shameful spectacle.

Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals literally spat in his delicate real-estate developer’s soul by blocking the construction of a ballroom on the site of the East Wing of the White House, noting that the president lacks the authority to remodel the residence without congressional approval—just as the name “Trump,” which he had arbitrarily attached to the Kennedy Center, had to be removed from the facade.

It became abundantly clear that Trump’s presidency was headed for an early collapse when his attempt to combine his personal milestone—the president’s 80th birthday— with the country’s 250th anniversary turned, quite literally, into a circus on the White House lawn—gladiatorial cage fights that ended with the winner shouting that Barack Obama’s wife is a “man.” Clearly done to please the client. You couldn’t come up with a better way to demonstrate that the current president is “no man.”

Unlike the Trump who strutted like a peacock down the runway in Alaska to meet Putin, the current Trump is no longer interested in making history overseas, since nothing ever works out anyway. Maybe that’s for the best. Because he really isn’t cut out for it.