Vol. 111: He's got Putin under his skin

A bromance explained, with a little help from Connie Francis

One enchanted evening, Donald Trump saw a stranger. Yes, he saw a stranger across a crowded room— a maverick derided by polite society as the vulgar proprietor of “a gas station with an army.” Yet the young and impressionable Trump— he was not yet 70 at the time— was bedazzled by the stranger’s ability to project masculine power, whether riding bare-chested on horseback, poisoning enemies, arranging for them to die in plane crashes, or uttering grandiose pronouncements like “If I wanted to, I could take Kyiv in two weeks.” Never mind that, more than three years after first trying, the alluring stranger still hasn’t taken Kyiv: In that initial glance across the crowded room, somehow Trump knew— he knew even then— that somewhere he’d see him again and again.

A few years passed. While campaigning for the Republican nomination for president in 2015, Trump identified one politician he professed to admire: the macho stranger. “He’s running his country,” Trump told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” talk show, “and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country." After the two men met at Helsinki in 2018, Trump publicly insisted that he trusted the stranger more than he trusted the U.S. intelligence agencies that unanimously concluded that the handsome stranger— you guessed it: Vladimir Putin— had meddled in U.S. elections.

How deep is the love between these two men? Last Monday at the UN General Assembly, when 93 countries supported a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump saw to it that his country joined Putin’s country— along with dictatorships like North Korea, Nicaragua, Belarus, and Equatorial Guinea— in opposing the measure.

Who can explain it, who can tell you why?
Shrinks give you reasons, wise men never try.

Wisdom of Chico Marx

Under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia and other countries. Nevertheless, in 2014 Putin’s Russia invaded and annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea. In 2022 Putin launched a full-scale invasion of what remained of Ukraine. Yet only last Thursday, Trump reassured a skeptical world that his inamorata Putin would honor the terms of any peace treaty that might be reached in Ukraine.

“I think he’ll keep his word,” Trump explained. “I’ve spoken to him. I’ve known him for a long time.”

As Chico Marx put it in Duck Soup: “Who ya gonna believe— me, or your own eyes?”

Blackmail theory

What, exactly, explains Donald Trump’s infatuation with Vladimir Putin? Some observers (like me) think a narcissist like Trump instinctively defies convention in order to feed his insatiable hunger for attention. Others say a narcissist is especially susceptible to flattery from a master manipulator like Putin. Still others believe Putin has something on Trump— that Trump was caught in a compromising sexual position during a business trip to Moscow, circa 2013, when Russian agents supposedly arranged an evening for him with a bevy of hookers, all recorded by hidden cameras and microphones.

But Trump is impervious to blackmail because, in his view, he’s never done anything wrong. This is a man, remember, who boasted to journalists about his adulterous affair with Marla Maples while he was still married to Ivana. If he couldn’t be embarrassed by Stormy Daniels or E. Jean Carroll…. Besides, what Russian in 2013 would have dreamed that Trump might one day be president of the U.S.?

Connie Francis’s heart

I’m neither a shrink nor a wise man— just a wordsmith who scrapes out a living by pushing nouns and verbs against adjectives and adverbs. As such, it pains me to admit that explanations for the Trump-Putin romance lie beyond my pay grade. This is no job for Dan Rottenberg. This is a job for Ezio Pinza. Better still, this is a job for Connie Francis. (Click here.)

I told this heart of mine our love would never be
But then I hear your voice, and something stirs inside of me.
Somehow I can't dismiss the memory of your kiss.
Guess my heart has a mind of its own.

No matter what I do, no matter what I say,
No matter how I try, I just can't turn the other way.
When I'm with someone new, I always think of you.
Guess my heart has a mind of its own.

Judy Garland’s analysis

When Trump and Putin met in 2018 at the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires, Trump reportedly sat down with Putin for several minutes of conversation with no translator or note-taker from the U.S. side to record the dialogue between them. Since then, Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Putin. At least once, he took possession of his own interpreter’s notes and instructed the interpreter not to discuss what had transpired. In advance of the 2019 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump told reporters that his conversations with Putin were “none of your business.”

What were they covering up? This past November, before I realized I was in this subject over my head, I suggested in this column that the answer was nothing— that is, Trump and Putin just want to seem like they’re discussing something important. But now a more qualified investigative reporter— namely, Judy Garland— has provided me the full transcript of Trump’s words to Putin back in Buenos Aires. (Click here.)

The key section of Trump’s message runs as follows:

You made me love you,
I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it.
You made me want you,
And all the time you knew it,
I guess you always knew it.
You made me happy, sometimes you made me glad.
But there were times, dear, you made me feel so bad.

You made me cry ’cause
I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to tell you,
I think you’re grand, that’s true,
—Yes I do, ‘deed I do, you know I do—
I can’t tell you what I’m feeling;
The very mention of your name sends my heart reeling.
You know you made me love you.

When Putin (not unreasonably) pressed for specifics, Trump replied:

You made me cry ‘cause—
I didn’t want to tell you, I didn’t want to tell you—
I need some love, that’s true—
Yes I do, ’deed I do, you know I do.

Can you blame Trump for trying to hush this up?

What a man needs

According to my therapist, a man needs a woman who looks up to him, and a woman needs a man she can look up to. In Trump, Putin has found a man who looks up to him, and Trump has found in Putin a man he can look up to. Could Roy Cohn, Rudy Giuliani, or even Elon Musk measure up to such a model of manliness? As Yenta the Matchmaker put it in Fiddler on the Roof, it’s a perfect match!

Wait a minute. Trump isn’t a woman. He’s a man— a man so manly that he’s inordinately preoccupied with the transgender phenomenon. Do you suppose….

Nah. He’s stable, I tell you. Perfectly stable! Hasn’t he said so himself, repeatedly?

Back to you, Ezio:

Once you have found him, never let him go.
Once you have found him, neh-ver let him go!

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com