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 some good will come out.”

When the summit was first announced, national security adviser John Bolton indicated that there were no planned outcomes for it. Asked that day what he expected, Trump was vague.

“Well, I think we’ll be talking about Syria. I think we’ll be talking about Ukraine,” he said. “I think we’ll be talking about many other subjects. And we’ll see what happens. So you never know.”

He expanded that outward a bit during a news conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May last week.

“We’ll be talking to President Putin about a number of things: Ukraine. We’ll be talking about Syria. We’ll be talking about other parts of the Middle East. I will be talking about nuclear proliferation,” he said, then explaining how both the United States and Russia had flirted with improving their arsenals.

As the summit began on Monday, Trump revised the list again. “We have discussions on everything from trade to military to missiles to nuclear to China,” he said in opening remarks, seated next to Putin.

Missing, you’ll notice, is any discussion of Russian interference in the 2016 election or the poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in Britain earlier this year, an attack blamed on Putin’s government. (A British woman died earlier this month after apparently handling the same nerve agent used in that first attack.)

CBS asked Trump if he would ask Putin to extradite the 12 intelligence officers identified by the Department of Justice last week for their alleged role in hacking the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of Hillary Clinton two years ago.

“I hadn’t thought of that. But I certainly, I’ll be asking about it,” Trump said. “But again, this was during the Obama administration. They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration.”

When The Post’s Philip Rucker asked Trump last week if he would raise the interference at all, he brushed it off.

“We will, of course, ask your favorite question about meddling,” he said, then adding: “You know, what am I going to do? He may deny it. I mean, it’s one of those things. All I can do is say, ‘Did you’ and ‘Don’t do it again.’ But he may deny it. You’ll be the first to know.”

That assertion that Trump is powerless to hold Putin accountable on election interference raises an important question: How, then, does he plan to hold Putin accountable on Ukraine or Syria?

Or does he?

Much of the conversation between the two leaders will happen in the dark. Trump and Putin spoke for about an hour-and-a-half with no one in the room besides interpreters. CNN reported that there were three reasons given for that isolation:

• Trump wants “alone time to assess [Putin] better,”
• Trump didn’t want aides in the room who “who favor a hard line against Russia,” and
• Trump “didn’t want details of their conversation to leak.”

Those last two in particular are remarkable and easy to frame in an alarming way: Trump wants to treat Putin with generosity and doesn’t want the specifics of what he said to leak out.

The New Yorker reported earlier this month that some Middle Eastern leaders were pushing shortly before the election for a deal in which Trump lifted sanctions against Russia imposed following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 in exchange for a resolution of the civil war in Syria. Syria, the Middle East and Ukraine all in one subject of conversation — a conversation to which Russia hard-liners in his administration would likely object.

If the Trump-Putin confab mirrors Trump’s conversation with North Korea’s Kim, the president will hail the major breakthroughs that resulted, even if those breakthroughs are hard to identify under objective scrutiny.

Trump’s aim may be more modest. During a news conference last week, he offered another possible outcome of the summit: friendship.

“I hope we get along well,” Trump said. “I think we get along well. But ultimately, he’s a competitor. He’s representing Russia. I’m representing the United States. So, in a sense, we’re competitors. Not a question of friend or enemy. He’s not my enemy. And, hopefully, someday, maybe he’ll be a friend. But I just don’t know him very well. I’ve m This has been Trump’s refrain over and over, though generally less personally. Wouldn’t it be great if the United States and Russia got along? he’s asked repeatedly since the campaign. What if the president, rather than doing things like criticizing foreign leaders who allegedly murder people in allies’ countries, who invade neighboring countries and who try to subvert American democracy, instead tried a little kindness? This, too, undercuts the idea that Trump will hold Putin’s feet to the fire on any of those issues, however much his advisers (and his party) might hope that he does so.

We should have a sense of how friendly Trump and Putin have become in fairly short order.

et him a couple of times.”