Vol. 96: When a narcissist needs a friend

What do Trump and Putin talk about?

         Two days after his election as president this month, Donald Trump allegedly accepted telephone congratulations from Russian President Vladimir Putin and warned Putin not to escalate his war in Ukraine. Shortly thereafter, the Kremlin dismissed the report as “pure fiction.”

         “Trump has not even been sworn into his second term yet,” Jen Psaki fretted on MSNBC last week, “and there are already questions swirling about whether and why he is, once again, misleading the American public about his relationship with Russia and Putin.”

         If Trump is to be believed, his passion for Putin predates Trump’s political career. As far back as 2013, when he co-owned the Miss Universe contest, Trump announced that his tacky pageant would take place that year in Moscow. Shortly after, he revealed his motive.

         “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow?” Trump tweeted breathlessly in June 2013. “If so, will he become my new best friend?” I’m not making this up.

         That fall, before the pageant opened, Trump appeared on David Letterman’s “Late Night,” show, where the host asked if he had ever met Putin. “I met him once,” Trump replied, falsely.

‘At least he’s a leader’

         In 2015, while heaping contempt upon Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and Hillary Clinton, Trump found one politician he professed to admire: Putin. “In terms of leadership, he’s getting an A,” Trump told Fox News, “and our president is not doing so well.”

         Two months later, Putin returned the compliment, calling Trump “bright and talented” and “a brilliant intelligent person, without a doubt,” as well as “the absolute leader of the presidential race.”

The following day, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” talk show, Trump extended the love fest, citing Putin’s high favorability poll numbers among Russians. "He’s running his country,” Trump told the host, Joe Scarborough, “and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country."

A Covid gift

         After Trump became President, he and Putin finally did meet in 2017 at a G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. They met again the following year at another G20 summit in Buenos Aires. As the Financial Times reported  then, “Trump 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 the leaders.” 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.”

         Trump’s eagerness to befriend Putin segued into the global Covid pandemic in 2020, when the U.S. and other countries at first confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness. At that point, according to War, the recent book by the Washington Post’s associate editor Bob Woodward, Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Putin for his personal use. Putin, who was said to be petrified of Covid, gratefully accepted the supplies but cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow. “I don’t want you to tell anybody,” Putin said, according to Woodward, “because people will get mad at you, not me.”

         After Trump left office in 2021, according to an unnamed Trump aide cited by Woodward, Trump may have spoken to Putin by phone as many as seven times. Early this year— again, according to Woodward— Trump allegedly ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader,

         Not to put too fine a point on it, but these alleged conversations took place while Putin was waging war against a U.S. ally, and while Trump was pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight Russian invaders.

Feelings of insecurity

         In office or out, it would seem, Trump’s heart has (as Connie Francis put it) a mind of its own. It goes pitter-patter (as Irving Berlin put it) for just one redhaired Russian strongman. Night and day (as Cole Porter put it), Putin is the one.

What’s going on here? Are Trump and Putin hatching some nefarious plot to carve up the world? Or could it be something else? I vote for something else.

         If you are a narcissist, according to the Mayo Clinic’s definition, “you have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability, and humiliation.” When the whole world seems aligned against him, the narcissist instinctively seeks refuge with anyone who makes him feel comfortable. His relatives (Ivanka, Jared, Lara, Don Jr.) may fit that description. But Putin fits it even better.

         In a biography published in 2000, Putin proudly confided to an interviewer that as a young man he avoided the Soviet youth movements but was instead a shpana — a young tough or punk. The American political scientist John Mearsheimer described Putin as a man best understood “with reference to his hypermasculinity and the role of affect, or emotion, in his political choices,” as well as his preference for action over policy. This is a man after Trump’s heart — and one who understands how to manipulate that heart.

Putin frightens Merkel

         Trump and Putin are such masters of illusion, I would argue, that they’ve swallowed each other’s bullshit. Trump perceives Putin as the absolute ruler of the world’s largest land mass— 11 time zones!— when in fact Putin’s domain is an economic basket case whose gross domestic product is smaller than Italy’s or Mexico’s or New York State’s— a “gas station with an army,” as the late Senator John McCain described Russia. Putin, for his part, admires Trump for having won real elections in a real democracy with a real economy— an inconceivable achievement for Putin.
         During an infamous 2007 meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin— having learned beforehand that Merkel was afraid of dogs (she was attacked by one in 1995)— brought his large pet Labrador into the room. When Merkel froze, Putin smirked.
         Afterward, Merkel astutely analyzed the incident. “I understand why he has to do this — to prove he’s a man,” she told a group of reporters. “He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.”Now, put yourself in Trump’s shoes. You have no friends. In that case, whom would you rather have by your side— Angela Merkel, who punctures your fantasies, or Vladimir Putin, who reinforces them?

Trump’s friends

         Yes, I know what you’re thinking: Trump has tons of friends. Why, there’s Elon Musk. And Lindsey Graham. And Rudy Giuliani. And Steve Bannon. And Marco Rubio. And Tucker Carlson. And Matt Gaetz. And Elise Stefanik. And Pete Hegseth. And Tulsi Gabbard. And Bobby Kennedy Jr. The list is endless.

         I repeat: Trump has no friends. Minions, yes, Acolytes, yes. Folks he can use or who want to use him, yes. Wives, mistresses, and women he can grab by the crotch, yes. But in Trump’s infantile mind, nothing measures up to the grandiosity of that hunky dictator riding bare-chested on horseback.

         So, what do Trump and Putin discuss during their private talks— talks so private that only a translator is present, and no notes are permitted? What nefarious schemes are they concocting? If the plots aren’t evil, why this obsession with covering them up?

         Here’s my theory: Trump is obsessed with suppressing his conversations with Putin because those conversations deal with…

         Nothing.

Trump’s attention span

         As keen practitioners of the illusion of power, Trump and Putin have perfected the art of whispering in each other’s ear while posing for photographers, as if they have something meaningful to impart. When they talk on the phone, the mere fact that they’re talking on the phone impresses the hell out of everyone and reinforces each other’s notion of his own importance.

         But if, God forbid, word ever leaked out that they’re just talking about sports, or women, or what’s your favorite TV show, or how Donald would be dating Ivanka if she weren’t his daughter… Do you get my drift? The whole ball game would be over for both men.

         Trump’s short attention span is legendary. Five minutes into his first interview with Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter for The Art of The Deal, Trump asked, “How long is this going to take?” according to Schwartz. Thereafter, Schwartz dashed off the rest of Trump’s book by himself. Early in his first term, Trump granted The New York Times an interview about the nation’s infrastructure. But he kept changing the subject because, it turned out, he preferred to talk about riding the New York subway as a kid. Can you imagine such a fellow gabbing with Putin by the hour about an equitable solution in Ukraine?

         “The more you are talked about,” the 19^th Century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once observed, “the less powerful you are.” Trump and Putin have updated Disraeli: The more secretive you are, the more powerful people think you are.

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