Hannity, instead of probing Trump on the substance of his summit with President Putin, assumed the part of a court flatterer—hailing him as a peacemaker in five conflicts while squandering the remainder of the airtime on ritual grievances about the ‘Russia hoax,’ stock tirades against NATO’s economic burdens, and perfunctory denunciations of Biden’s incompetence.
Trump, ever the alpha narcissist, thrives on this. He loves to be admired, he loves to speak of himself in superlatives, and he longs to be seen as the indispensable man who could deliver peace where others fail. Yet the truth peeks out between the lines. His body language during the joint press conference and the interview betrayed more discomfort than triumph.
A man who claims victory too loudly often does so to mask defeat.
Putin, for his part, played his hand shrewdly. “When President Trump says if he was the president back then, there would be no war... it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” he said. The compliment was perfunctory—a gesture of politeness, not conviction. The structural causes of the Ukraine war—NATO’s steady eastward march and Russia’s refusal to accept it—would have produced conflict no matter who sat in the Oval Office. To imagine that Trump alone could have forestalled it is to mistake theatre for geopolitics.
Trump’s claim to be a global peacemaker collapses before the hard realities of great-power politics. He may exert influence over the minor quarrels of Armenia and Azerbaijan, or even Thailand and Cambodia. But with Putin, he is powerless. Russia does not yield to charm, and history does not bend to bravado.
Worse, Trump has shown a tendency to belittle India, a nation he should treat as a partner. In one of his social media pronouncements, he framed Putin’s flattery in terms that seemed to place India in a subordinate role. This is shortsighted at best, insulting at worst.
India today is the world’s fourth-largest economy, projected to become the third by 2028. It is not merely a market but the only functioning constitutional democracy of scale in South Asia—a fact any American president must respect if he claims to speak the language of freedom.
As for Ukraine, no leader in Kyiv can accept the partition of their territory as the price of peace. Trump will not be able to impose Putin’s terms. That leaves him grasping for alternatives.
The danger is that, frustrated abroad, he may lash out elsewhere—perhaps by reviving tariffs on India, which he perceives as a softer target. China, too deeply entangled with Russia and too formidable in economic weight, would be spared his ire. India, by contrast, risks being punished for the very fact that it is a democracy, vulnerable to the volatility of a man who mistakes intimidation for statecraft.
History teaches that hubris often precedes humiliation. A self-proclaimed peacemaker who cannot command peace risks becoming instead a warmonger’s useful foil. The world expects sobriety, not self-congratulation, from the leader of a superpower.
And if Trump cannot distinguish between applause in a TV studio and power on the world stage, he will soon learn that history is a harsher interviewer than Sean Hannity.
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