fiasco Archives · Zepp's Commentaries

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 17^th 2025

By just about any metric, the so-called ‘summit’ between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump was an utter catastrophe for Trump. Visually, he looked horrible. He alighted from AF-1 and staggered along the arm of the T-shaped red carpet like a parody of Andy Capp, came to a halt at the intersection, turned, and applauded the approaching Russian dictator. If he had been physically capable, he might have dropped to his knees and kissed Putin’s boot. He may as well have.

Then he let the dictator inside the Presidential limo, something never accorded a visiting foreign leader before. Many commentators suggested the vehicle be swept carefully for bugs following the transport of the ex-KGB agent. One image shows Putin sitting next to Trump and apparently holding his nose.

None of the top people accompanying the two were diplomats. Most were involved in industry and finance, the sorts you might find at high-level trade talks. That creates the impression the top order of business wasn’t Ukraine, but rather a lucrative deal between the world’s two top kleptocrats.

It was accompanied with the extraordinary incompetence that is the hallmark of the Trump administration. Prior to the meeting, some aides printed out a copy of the itinerary, including some fairly sensitive information that assassins or people planting listening devices would find extremely useful, and then left a copy in the printer for some visiting tourists at the hotel to find!

Given how sullen and silent Trump was following their secret three-hour meeting, it was safe to assume Putin ate his lunch, and did so in a way that even Trump couldn’t fail to notice. Trump went on Hannity (the journalistic equivalent of a fascist cum dump) and his bluster was singularly vacuous and vacant. He looked and sounded like a hick who was beginning to wonder if he really should have traded the family cow for a handful of beans.

Putin made the scale of the concessions obvious the next day when he stated that Russia would accept nothing less than absorption of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as a condition for a cease fire.

Trump didn’t disgrace himself—that’s simply not possible. But he did disgrace America pretty badly. But he’ll pay: he’ll return to find California and major cities all but at war with his regime, food costs exploding as the tariffs kick in, and yes, questions about the Epstein files.

But one odd thing occurred that, if true, suggests that Putin slipped very badly. Quoting from the Guardian this morning:

Special US envoy Steve Witkoff has also been speaking to the media. He said on Sunday that Vladimir Putin agreed at the Alaska summit with Donald Trump to allow the US and European allies to offer Ukraine a security guarantee resembling Nato’s collective defence mandate (article 5: an attack on one member is an attack on all) as part of an eventual deal to end the war.

Speaking with Jake Tapper, Witkoff told CNN’s State of the Union programme:

We got to an agreement that the United States and other European nations could effectively offer article five like language to cover a security guarantee. So Putin has said that a red flag is Nato admission.

And so what we were discussing was assuming that that held, assuming that the Ukrainians could agree to that, and could live with that, and everything is going to be about what the Ukrainians can live with.

But assuming they could, we were able to win the following concession: that the United States could offer article five, like protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in Nato, we sort of were able to bypass that and get an agreement that the United States could offer article five protection, which was the first time we had ever heard the Russians agree to that.

If this is true, NATO needs to convene first thing tomorrow and hold a vote on extending Article Five to include the Ukraine. The United States is in the position where they announced this, so they can hardly turn around and veto the proposal without looking like absolute shite. Even Trump’s toerag Hungary would have to go along.

That would effectively end the Ukrainian conflict. Russia would hold their positions, but anything of an offensive nature would risk war with all of NATO, and at that, a war the economically and militarily depleted Russians couldn’t possibly hope to win.

I’ve heard that Putin has severe medical problems, up to and including Parkinson’s, and that mentally he isn’t in much better shape than Trump. Perhaps that is what lay behind this amazing concession. Or perhaps he’s crazy enough to think he could take on a coalition roughly double that of just America and win. I don’t know.

But we have a golden opportunity to end the fighting for now, and a pathway to perhaps getting Russia to retreated from the occupied areas.

Hopefully we won’t waste it.

sadclownTrump

Oklahoma Crude

Repulsa in Tulsa a Fiasco

June 21^st 2020

South of the equator, yesterday was the day of the Winter Solstice. So cheer up, fellas! You’re over the hump. Don’t lose hope. (Note to self: don’t mention that for the rest of us in the northern hemisphere, it’s all downhill from here.)

I was keeping a wary eye on the news yesterday, since the Trump campaign kick-off rally took place in Tulsa, OK. There was a confluence of so many factors that I was concerned that it could prove a flash point leading to a very large social explosion.

It may well have been on the minds of all those gathered: the Trump supporters, the protesters and counter protesters, and the police. Aside from a few minor incidents, the event concluded peacefully, which was a credit to all sides. Even the ones who might have been looking for trouble seemed to have second thoughts.

Trump was determined to stir the shit, and brought his full arsenal of race-baiting, xenophobia, and defamation of any who oppose him to the show. But he gazed around the half-empty stadium, doubtlessly thinking of his campaign’s boasts that a million people had expressed an interest in attending (only 6,275 did, according to the stadium gatekeepers), and gave his two-hour speech in a listless monotone, and just fifteen minutes in, his enthusiastic audience of true believers were beginning to look openly bored. Outside, the stage for the planned-for overflow rally was being dismantled (the campaign seriously expected between 100 and 300 thousand people to flood into Tulsa for this event) and millions of viewers were gifted with the eerie sight of a twenty-four foot screen in the parking lot showing Trump addressing the audience inside, with an audience of exactly nobody. You would think that there might be some old guy, taking his dog out for an evening stroll, who stopped to see what the asshole was saying while his dog relieved itself, but no. Just one lonely, bored tech whose job it was to make sure nobody stole the screen or the equipment running it. And he wasn’t even watching it.

Trump, apparently determined to keep the public attention focused on his mental and physical health, ranted for 15 minutes about the news noting his difficulties maneuvering down the ramp at the West Point ceremony (It didn’t help that someone found an old video of Obama ascending the same ramp with the carefree grace of a teenager). Trump then essayed to show his audience that yes, he could indeed drink a glass of water using one hand. The audience cheered—one of the few things they really had to cheer about on this sad night—but everyone watching on television could see it was a tiny 6 ounce glass, half-full, and even then his movements were slow and considered. If it was a sobriety test, he would have failed. He went on to rant about poor old lazy and demented Joe, apparently unaware that the Biden campaign had just put out an ad showing Biden jogging, where he pauses to tell the camera, “I would like to see Trump do this.”

Trump also made the extraordinarily stupid boast that he asked for testing for the coronavirus to be slowed down, leaving people to wonder if he really thought less tests meant less cases. That’s a bit like eating 4,000 calories a day, convinced that so long as you don’t step on the scales, you aren’t putting on weight. It’s magical thinking, and about the lowest and most self-destructive form of magical thinking there is. This should be in every Democratic ad between now and November, if they have any sense at all.

Speaking of which, one online correspondent told me that the sparse turnout may have saved thousands of lives. Given the exponential nature of contagion, I’ve little doubt that he’s right. Horowitz, of course, had the mot juste: “Coronavirus disappointed by small turnout.” Trump’s campaign slogan ought to be “Donald: Because he’s killed a lot less people than he might have.”

Finally, there were the images of the Donald alighting from the Marine helicopter on the grounds of the White House in the predawn hours. Exhausted, haggard, obviously depressed, he had his tie undone and hanging from around his neck like a suicidal rattlesnake, and his pose could only be described as ‘abject.’

Fingerpointing for this undeniable fiasco began at once. Brad Parscale, man most likely to be unemployed by Monday night, opined that the campaign based its inflated projections of attendance on thousands of K-Pop fans on TikTok who reserved most of the tickets and flooded the “interested in attending” page. Someone finally noticed the hideous optics of a professional campaign getting scammed like that by a bunch of teenagers in Korea (you don’t put a $25 deposit on reserving a ticket, for crissakes?) and decided that some 300,000 committed Republicans were going to show, but were scared off by AntiFa(scists) and BLM protesters. There were about 300 anti-Trump protesters there, consisting of the usual suspects—school teachers, college students, and (shiver violently as I say the words) people who hate fascists. If they really scared off 300,000 Republicans, then they made the Battle of Thermopylae look weak by comparison. The Trump campaign just blamed the poor attendance on widespread cowardice within the party. That should play well with his supporters.

Trump looked like a cornered rat, and you know what they say about cornered rats. He, and his party and followers, are going to be more dangerous and extreme going forward, now unable to entertain the belief they are an unstoppable popular front.

One indication of this came in the form of an unbelievable full page ad in the Nashville Tennessean. In fairness, the paper did immediately repudiate and pull the ad once the blow-back began, saying, “The ad is horrific and is utterly indefensible in all circumstances. It is wrong, period, and should have never been published. It has hurt members of our community and our own employees and that saddens me beyond belief. It is inconsistent with everything The Tennessean as an institution stands and has stood for and with the journalism we have produced.”

Fair enough. But the ad was beyond belief, written by some end-times crackpot who claimed that “Islam” was going to explode a nuclear weapon in Nashville sometime during the month of July. Quite aside from the hateful nature of the speech, there’s the fact that not everyone in Nashville is that tightly wound, and an ad like that could cause a panic.

There’s never a shortage of end-times crackpots around. I know several personally. Generally, they’re harmless. But some have both money and malice. And it’s not unusual for papers to have various nuts show up, money in hand, demanding that the local paper vouchsafe whatever demented and paranoid fantasies they have to the populace. Generally, papers have enough sense to tell them to bugger off.

Someone in a position of responsibility at the Tennessean thought publishing this was a good idea. Maybe it would get a few Moslems lynched. Maybe it would help Trump. Someone thought something this extreme and foolish would help the cause.

The right is crowded with people like that, and they are starting to panic.