President Donald Trump landed in Helsinki for his high-stakes summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin after ranting that no set of concessions – no matter how large the consequences – would be good enough for media critics he branded the ‘enemy of the people.’
‘Unfortunately, no matter how well I do at the Summit, if I was given the great city of Moscow as retribution for all of the sins and evils committed by Russia,’ he said, ‘over the years, I would return to criticism that it wasn’t good enough – that I should have gotten Saint Petersburg in addition!’
Trump sent out the missive focusing about how his actions would be perceived in the press after indicating in an interview that he had low expectations for the summit and failing to articulate in an interview what his goal was. Earlier, he had attacked the European Union as a ‘foe’ in a broadcast interview that aired Sunday.
If he was planning to drive a hard bargain with Putin, a former KGB colonel with a grip on power in Moscow, he didn’t show it. Asked in a broadcast interview about his goal for the summit, Trump replied: ”I’ll let you know after the meeting.’
President Donald Trump arrived in Helsinki after blasting the ‘enemy of the people’ media, saying he wouldn’t get a fair grade on his performance with Russian President Vladimir Putin
As he arrived in the Finnish capital, Trump waived to onlookers and slowly descended the stairs of Air Force One. He was accompanied by First Lady Melania Trump, who wore dark sunglasses and a long jacket for a historic summit that will put the president alone in the same room with the man accused of ordering a hacking campaign that targeted Democrats in the 2016 presidential election.
The first lady, born in Slovenia under the shadow of Soviet influence, wore a white shirt and long, tailored grey coat. She also wore tan leather pants.
Trump’s motorcade then took him immediately to his hotel. The real action occurs Monday, when he is set to meet one-on-one with Putin and then hold a joint ‘media availability’ that will have the two men addressing a swarm of media side-by-side.
Trump also plans to sell the outcome in post-summit interviews on Fox News and CBS. Putin is planning to sit down with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace in a rare interview with a U.S. media outlet at a time of high tension between Russia and the U.S.
The president waived to greeters as he arrived in Helsinki
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive at Helsinki-Vantaa airport in Vantaa, Finland, July 15, 2018
The first lady wore a white shirt and a long tailored jacket
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrived in Helsinki after Trump blasted the ‘enemy of the people’ media, saying he wouldn’t get a fair grade on his performance with Russian President Vladimir Putin
Putin will arrive basking in the glow of a successful world cup tournament that France won in a match Sunday evening local time while Trump was in the air. Trump congratulated Putin on the tournament in the same tweet where he celebrated the victorious French team.
Both Putin and Macron were on hand in the pouring rain to shake hands of the winning French teammates in St. Petersburg.
Trump sent out the pre-spin amid fears from his political rivals that he would give ground to Putin, a strategic adversary to U.S. policy goals, having been criticized since the campaign for his refusal to criticize Putin.
Among critics mostly on the left, Putin is sometimes described as Trump’s ‘handler,’ and since Friday’s indictments Trump has variously been described as an ‘asset’ or even an agent for Putin.
The president didn’t do much to dissuade his rivals by piling on criticism of European allies.
‘Well I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade,’ Trump volunteered to CBS when asked about his goal for the summit. ‘Now you wouldn’t think of the European Union but they’re a foe,’ Trump said.
The president waived to reporters in advance of his meeting with Putin
Trump is meeting with a man he calls a ‘competitor’ but not an ‘enemy.’
‘He’s been very nice to me the times I’ve met him. I’ve been nice to him. He’s a competitor,’ Trump said of Putin last at the NATO summit where he went after Germany. ‘You know, somebody was saying, ‘Is he an enemy?’ No, he’s not my enemy. ‘Is he a friend?’ No, I don’t know him well enough,’ Trump said.
Trump headed to Finland after a weekend of golf in Scotland for a closely-watched meeting with Russia’s president.
On Air Force One, the president said in tweets that the media is nonetheless setting him up to fail, saying that ‘much of our news media is indeed the enemy of the people’ in a bombastic message that followed a gripe about North Korea shortly before that had ended with him calling the press ‘fake news.’
President Trump set the tone for his Helsinki summit in tweets on Sunday morning en route to Finland
President Donald Trump is heading to Helsinki after a weekend of golf for a closely-watched meeting with Vladimir Putin
He and first lady Melania Trump are seeing taking off from Glasgow Prestwick
The motorcade transporting President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump is seen on the road leaving Trump Turnberry golf resort on Sunday
BYE BYE TRUMP: Local residents turned out to see the president leave in his motorcade in lights showers
Democrats were not left unscathed in the tweet meant to lower the bar further for his Putin meeting and shift the heat to his detractors.
Trump said all that members of the opposing political party ‘know how to do is resist and obstruct! This is why there is such hatred and dissension in our country – but at some point, it will heal!’
The president only had kind words for Putin, saying he was ‘looking forward to meeting’ with him in one tweet, and asserting that the Russian leader had put ‘on a truly great World Cup Tournament’ in another.
Much of our news media is indeed the enemy of the people.
Trump’s tweet came as Putin stood in the pouring rain in St. Petersburg, Russia to congratulate the victorious French team.
France had just claimed victory over Croatia in the World Cup at the time of the tweet. Twitter users complained throughout the messages that Trump should chill out and watch the game instead of tweeting from his plane.
Trump was due to land in Helsinki on Sunday evening ahead of his talk on Monday with Putin.
He said Saturday that was preparing for the meeting the White House now insists is not a full-fledged summit from his Turnberry property in South Aryshire. He broke off twice to golf, however, calling the activity his ‘favorite form of exercise’ in a Saturday morning message.
Unlike his Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, where the president at least pushed for a denuclearization deal as he claimed that the meeting itself was an accomplishment, Trump has been hesitant to set any expectations for Helsinki at all.
‘I go in with low expectations,’ the president told CBS News. ‘I’m not going with high expectations.’
Still, the summit is happening in the typical Trump style: heavy on the personal and light on an established program.
The president prefers the personal touch when it comes to diplomacy and likes one-on-one time with fellow world leaders. He tends to skew a formal, written agenda.
High-level planning sessions have been absent ahead of the trip to Helsinki, where the two world leaders have their sit-down on Monday. Only one White House aide, National Security Adviser John Bolton, has met with senior Russians officials to plan the face-to-face, reports the Los Angeles Times.
It’s a notable difference from the usual planning that goes into a meeting between world leaders.
U.S. and North Korean officials met in Singapore ahead of their leaders’ historic meeting to work out all the details, including who sat where, which aides would be in the room, meal times, break times, and what gifts would be exchanged.
‘The agenda is the president’s. Everything will be his call,’ U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Hunstman said Sunday morning on NBC.
Neither the U.S. nor Russia have not agreed upon any ‘deliverables’ to come out of Monday’s meeting. The president has also declined to give his goals for the sit-down – until after the world leaders meet.
When CBS News asked him about his goals for his the meeting with Putin, Trump responded: ‘I’ll let you know after the meeting’ and promised ‘nothing bad’ will come out of it.
EU President Donald Tusk responded to Trump’s claim the EU was a ‘foe’ on trade
President Trump said he has ‘low expectations’ for his meeting with Vladimir Putin
Foreign policy experts around the world fear Trump may make concessions to Putin when the two leaders have their one-on-one time with no one else in the room but the translators.
Trump could promise to ease sanctions or cut U.S. military operations in Europe without consulting the State Department or the Pentagon. Moscow is under U.S. and international sanctions for its seizure of Crimea in 2014.
The president made a similar move in his meeting with Kim, where he announced the U.S. would cease a joint military exercise with South Korea – a major concession to Pyongyang and a surprise to the Pentagon and U.S. allies.
Trump said Thursday if he could consider ending U.S. military exercises in the Baltic states. ‘
‘Perhaps we’ll talk about that,’ he said, which sounded alarm bells to some.
Huntsman said Sunday that he doesn’t expect any changes to the United States’ position on Crimea.
‘This was a violation of international law,’ he said. ‘Of course it’s the president’s call, but I think it’s highly unlikely that that’s going to emerge in their conversation…There’s a lot more to talk about, strategic stability, Syria, Ukraine, D.P.R.K., our bilateral relationship.’
He added, ‘We’ve got a fraught bilateral relationship. The collective blood pressure between the United States and Russia is off the charts high. So, it’s a good thing these presidents are getting together.’
Germany, Britain and other U.S. allies have publicly welcomed the president’s meeting with Putin. Privately, officials from the nations have taken a cautious approach.
‘I don’t even dare to speculate,’ one official from a NATO member nation told the Los Angeles Times. ‘It’s so unpredictable right now in the current circumstances.’
Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump talk during a break of a leader’s meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Da Nang, Vietnam in November
For Putin, the Helsinki meeting is his chance to play statesman on the world stage. It is also an opportunity for him to assure the president who has been raging about a Russian-pipeline deal with Germany that he’s not planning blackmail Berlin.
Putin will also be eager to escape U.S. sanctions for the incursion into Crimea and election meddling. He says his nation isn’t responsible for either bad acts.
President Trump is not showing his hand before the sit down.
‘I think it’s a good thing to meet. I do believe in meetings,’ he told CBS News. ‘Nothing bad is going to come out of it, and maybe some good will come out.’
The sit down between the two world leaders follows the Justice Department indictment of 14 Russians who were part of a hacking conspiracy that targeted the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign staffers during the 2016 election.
The indictment says they created cutouts and set up DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 accounts to dump embarrassing emails and passed others on to Wikileaks.
Trump, who was briefed on the indictment before Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s announcement Friday said he ‘hadn’t thought’ to bring up extradition when he meets with Putin.
The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Russia.
Asked whether he might push Putin to extradite the Russians so they could face trial, Trump, who has been accused of being to favorably disposed toward the Russian president, said he hadn’t thought of it.
‘Well, I might,’ Trump told CBS. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But I certainly, I’ll be asking about it.’
He continued to blame the Obama administration.
‘But again, this was during the Obama administration. They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration,’ he said.
Monday’s meeting is the first formal meeting between the two world leaders.
The two men had their first face-to-face greeting at the G20 summit last year in Hamburg, Germany, last July. They had a brief meeting in November at the APEC Summit in Da Nang, Vietnam.
President Trump, who golfed in Scotland this weekend, has foreign policy experts worried he could offer concessions to Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin greets Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic during their talks at the Kremlin. She is in Moscow to watch the final game of the 2018 FIFA World Cup
President Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un had a goal of denuclearization
On Sunday on NBC, Huntsman insisted the meeting is not a summit, however.
Huntsman categorized it as a ‘meeting’ and claimed that the ‘summit’ characterization is wrong, even though he had also used the term.
On an on-the-record call with reporters in advance of Trump’s trip to Europe, he’d said: ‘I harken back to some summits that I’ve done before, all the way back to Ronald Reagan where I helped to prepare Reagan’s first trip to China and Barack Obama’s trip to China in 2009. And what is important in all these cases is dialogue. And this can take many forms. But what is important here is that we start a discussion.
‘We’ve had discussions on the margins of meetings — Hamburg, G20, the APEC meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam, but this really is the first opportunity for a sit-down and to begin that very important dialogue, much the way we saw President Reagan do it with Mikhail Gorbachev, or Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev,’ he said.
Helsinki has been the site of other historic summits between the United States and Russia.
In 1975, 35 nations met there in an attempt to improve relations between the Communists and the West, signing The Helsinki Accords.
In March 1997, then-President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin met in Helsinki on security and economic issues.
President Trump is approaching his Putin meeting with his typical confidence that his personality and instincts will give him the edge.
Trump said that history of negotiations helped him get a read on Kim after he met the North Korean leader in Singapore. He told DailyMail.com in the Oval Office, that he’d been ‘preparing’ all his live and didn’t need additional briefings.
The president prides himself on his ability to read people and often breaches diplomatic protocol in favor of one-on-one conversations.
In July of last year, when Trump met with Putin at the G20 gathering, the meeting between the two men that was originally scheduled for 30 minutes went well over the two-hour mark. It ran so long that first lady Melania Trump was sent in to try and end it, although she failed in her attempt.