I don’t know where to start with the outrage over this “summit“ on American soil with the Russian dictator, who has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians and orchestrated the kidnapping of tens of thousands of their children. My expectations for the summit were low to begin with, which I imagine is true of anyone who’s followed this war for the last three years and/or the presidency of Donald Trump since 2017.

The expectations were correct.

Before even a word was exchanged, it was clear that the best Ukraine could hope for was not to be sold out by the U.S. president, who had American soldiers rolling out the red carpet for the former head of the KGB. Vladimir Putin is considered a war criminal by most Western world leaders and international authorities, and yet Donald Trump completely forgot his recent criticism of the Russian buddy with whom he’s gone through so much.

Mr. Trump looked like he wanted to kiss the man who invaded a sovereign nation without provocation. The president stood energetically shaking Putin’s hand between both of his own, while practically bowing to the Russian leader on the red carpet. That was after clapping for him on the tarmac. Good grief!

I can only come up with one explanation for why this took place on American soil. Donald Trump thinks that everyone either is or should be like him. He appears incapable of enough self evaluation to realize that he, like everyone else, has a few traits that could stand some evolution. The most relevant of which for this subject is the genuinely sad and profoundly real desire to be loved and admired by people he thinks are superior to him in some fashion. It seems that dictators, more than anyone else on the planet, fit this category. The only other members of it appear to be wealthy men who are wealthier than Mr. Trump. The Elon Musk’s of the world, in other words.

And so with enough flattery and completely inappropriate royal treatment (like standing on American soil in the first place!) of someone who is known to have murdered political opponents, both at home and abroad, Mr. Trump thought that Mr. Putin might actually give him a peace in Ukraine that would facilitate matching President Obama‘s Nobel Peace Prize with one of his own. What the American president doesn’t seem to realize is that absolutely everyone in the world who’s paying attention has his number.

He is the one on whom flattery works to obtain a desired goal. Reason is irrelevant and justice unimportant. One need only be the last person in the room, have a well-placed compliment that immediately proceeds a pointed request, and there’s probably a near-perfect chance that Donald Trump will provide the desired result with a big smile and chest full of misplaced pride.

This is almost certainly how Vladimir Putin walked away from this so-called summit with Donald Trump calling Volodymyr  Zelenskyy to tell him the terms for an end of the war are ceding the rest of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region, effectively calling into question why Ukrainians spent so much blood and treasure keeping Russians out of the areas for the last three years! His countrymen would undoubtedly be outraged.

This is the reporting of the Financial Times, backed up by Mr. Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity, in which the president said the ball is now in Zelenskyy‘s court to meet Putin‘s terms! So much for not completely selling out Ukraine.

I will catch up later today with the Sunday show spin on this diplomatic farce. But for now, I interrupt a vacation to comment as a dispirited and angry American, with a child living and working in the now-occupied city of D.C., wondering how long it will take for this nation to come back from a presidency that is merely months old. Someone out there – many someones, please! – need to be writing the recovery plan right now. We need not wait for the next election.