IN RECENT DAYS, President Donald Trump welcomed his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to Anchorage, Alaska for a bilateral meeting. He was scorned by his legions of critics for literally rolling out the red carpet for a patently malevolent individual and for his generally fawning interactions with the alleged war criminal.

He then received Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Washington, DC. No doubt fearing the potential for a further humiliation in the White House, a contingent of European leaders also travelled both to bolster Zelenskyy and to make their collective voice heard.

On the first, again, the commentary was broadly negative, beyond Trump’s most loyal adherents who refuse to acknowledge that their hero can do anything wrong and claim he operates at an advanced level his enemies do not fathom. Writing in The Guardian, David Smith opined that it was worse than Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler in Munich in the late 1930s and that Putin was “looking like the cat who got the cream.”

On the second, the diagnoses were, frankly, all over the shop. Divergent news bulletins announced that the confab was an enormous success for Zelenskyy and Europe with Trump positing that the United States would provide a security guarantee for Ukraine or that this gathering was even worse for Zelenskyy, who prostrated himself by wearing formal clothes, and that the assembled Europeans were sycophants.

The truth is that – with a face-to-face between Putin and Zelenskyy supposedly looming, to be followed by a “trilat” with Trump in attendance – there is room for extremely cautious optimism that we might (key word) be at the start of what will be a long and winding road to peace. How much Zelenskyy is prepared to give up and if a signal from Putin that he will forsake his manifestly expansionist ambition can be trusted are at the heart of the impasse.

The only opinion that matters

Irreconcilables must somehow be reconciled to achieve the “end to the killing” President Trump repeatedly asserts is his goal. And whether those who hate him so vehemently like it or not, a cessation in the war begun by Russia probably cannot happen without his administration’s involvement. To be sure, Trump has basked in the global limelight and is relishing the notion that he could be a peacemaker worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Yet in his conduct on this front and in his rhetoric on world affairs, he has drifted a good distance from the America First message that served him so well in two successful presidential campaigns. That said, the expert analysts who accuse him of being a geopolitical ignoramus and continually say that he and his team of foreign policy novices are being “played” by Putin and others may be correct on the merits, but they are missing a big trick. They simultaneously warn that Trump is wholly lacking in sophistication and evidently assume there is a master plan here. It’s odd.

In short, he is not negotiating for Ukraine out of concern for what has been wrought on that place and its people; nor is he on Russia’s side, owing to a sneaking regard for the authoritarian Putin or kompromat that the Kremlin has on him. He is seeking a quick win, a headline that he helped engender a stop to the bloodshed that he can flaunt at home. In his estimation, that would rally his base and possibly persuade a few converts. The American people – that is, those who voted for him enthusiastically or who see him as flawed though preferable to the offerings of the Democratic Party – are the sole jury whose verdict he cares about.

Trump is indifferent to the conditions of a ceasefire. He would prefer that it last. If it doesn’t, however, he will have washed his hands of a problem thousands of miles away and handed it back to the Europeans to deal with. He recognises that the clear majority of the US electorate would rather his attention be focused on their daily challenges stateside and have long believed that Europe gets a “free ride” on defence, courtesy of their tax dollars. Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, et al are acutely aware of this reality. That’s among the reasons they dashed across the Atlantic to join Zelenskyy.

Democrats still disconnected

Meanwhile, Trump has ordered the National Guard onto the streets of America’s capital city to quell the violence that has been rampant there for decades, despite a downturn this year. In a column lamenting the appearance of armed troops in her city, as plenty of us looking on from afar do, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times nonetheless notes that “many DC residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what statistics say, they don’t feel safe.”

“Feel” is the key word. Democrats have primarily responded to Trump’s objectively radical move by citing the statistics showing that the crime rate is lower in mid-2025, albeit from an astronomic high. They should instead be demonstrating empathy with local residents, assailing massive cuts to the DC budget and calling for more police to be hired across the US. In so doing they should repudiate the “defund the police” narrative that Republicans have spread effectively and which has led tens of millions of Americans to “feel” that Democrats are soft on crime.

But on this one, and on a host of other issues, they are lost. It’s hard to divine if they don’t actually comprehend how politics works anymore, won’t countenance the fact that constituencies once firmly in their corner aren’t “enlightened” enough to get behind the leftist cultural agenda they’ve endorsed enthusiastically or are basically enslaved to the whims of their moneyed donors and special interests. I suspect it’s a mixture of all three. The bottom line is that what they are perceived to stand for and what very many citizens “feel” are quite disconnected at the moment.

That is reflected in a voter registration crisis for the party. According to New York Times reportage, Democrats are faring worse with new voters, battleground territories are shifting rightward and the 38 percentage point advantage they enjoyed with first time female voters in 2018 declined to 10 percentage points in 2024. Additionally, the situation has not improved since Donald Trump was inaugurated in January. This could, of course, change rapidly. Still, the picture is bleak now.

As Democrats flail, one thing is certain. To the delight of his supporters and the fury of his opponents, Trump will keep on Trumping – come what may for the rest of us.

Larry Donnelly is a Boston lawyer, a law lecturer at the University of Galway and a political columnist with The Journal.