Trump’s conflicting, evolving explanations of why he’s meeting with Vladimir Putin
It’s safe to say that President Trump’s weekend may not have been dominated by intense prep work for his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. On both Saturday and Sunday , he played played a round of golf at his company’s course in Turnberry, Scotland. Shortly before the summit began, Trump also copped to watching Sunday’s World Cup final, hosted in Putin’s home country. That’s somewhere in the vicinity of 10 hours of downtime, shortly before one of the more important bilateral meetings of his presidency. But, then, Trump has fostered the idea that he was going to play this one by ear. In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, he said that he was going “in with low expectations.” His approach seemed to be something like: A meeting for a meeting’s sake. “I think it’s a good thing to meet. I do believe in meetings. I believe that having a meeting with Chairman Kim [Jong Un of North Korea] was a good thing,” Trump said. “Nothing bad is going to come out of it, and maybe
