{"id":301517,"date":"2025-08-25T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=301517"},"modified":"2025-08-20T04:38:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T03:38:12","slug":"the-alaska-summit-was-a-spectacular-distraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/08\/the-alaska-summit-was-a-spectacular-distraction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Alaska Summit Was a Spectacular Distraction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for photos during a US-Russia summit on Ukraine at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on 15 Aug 2025.
[Gavriil Grigorov\/Pool, Sputnik via AFP]<\/p><\/div>\n

Trump needed a break from the infighting in MAGA so he decided an inconsequential meeting with Putin would do the trick.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

17 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Say you are the president of the United States and the relationship with a significant chunk of your political base has become less than blissfully harmonious. What do you do?<\/p>\n

Well, one option is to stage a summit, accompanied by much fanfare, with the president of Russia, ostensibly in order to end that country\u2019s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

And this is precisely the manoeuvre that was pulled by US President Donald Trump, who on Friday rolled out the red carpet<\/a> in Alaska for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The short-lived encounter was ultimately anticlimactic, with Trump offering the incisive assessment that \u201cThere\u2019s no deal until there\u2019s a deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fox News reported that Trump had rated the much-anticipated meeting with Putin a \u201c10\u201d out of 10 and that he particularly \u201cappreciated the Russian president\u2019s comments when he claimed he would not have invaded Ukraine had Trump won the 2020 presidency\u201d.<\/p>\n

Fox went on to add that neither head of state had bothered to specify the \u201creasoning behind these comments\u201d.<\/p>\n

At any rate, the no-deal talks constituted a convenient distraction from current intra-MAGA strife, which owes to a couple of factors. There is, for example, the matter of the files relating to the late Jeffrey Epstein<\/a>, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.<\/p>\n

When US Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May on the Justice Department\u2019s review of the content of the so-called \u201cEpstein files\u201d, she reportedly informed the president that his name appeared therein.<\/p>\n

Despite having pledged while on the campaign trail to declassify the Epstein files, Trump changed tack earlier this year and angrily dismissed the investigation as a \u201choax\u201d. He went as far as to insult many of his Republican followers as \u201cstupid\u201d and \u201cfoolish\u201d for continuing to insist that the Epstein details be released.<\/p>\n

On July 12, the president took to social media with his signature preference for manic capitalisation to berate those demanding declassification: \u201cWe have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and \u2018selfish people\u2019 are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet this is not the only headache facing the \u201cPERFECT Administration\u201d from within Trump\u2019s own MAGA base, many of whose prominent members have become vocally critical of Israel\u2019s genocide in the Gaza Strip<\/a>, which Trump persists in aiding and abetting.<\/p>\n

The genocide, which will mark its two-year anniversary in October, has officially killed nearly 62,000 Palestinians thus far \u2013 although the true death toll is undoubtedly many times higher<\/a>. Apparently, Israel\u2019s behaviour was entirely palatable to much of the US political establishment when it simply consisted of unending massacres, slaughtered and mutilated babies, bombed hospitals, and razed neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n

Now that mass starvation<\/a> has been visibly added to the genocidal mix, however, Israel seems to have crossed a red line even among formerly staunch devotees. As per Gaza\u2019s Ministry of Health, the death toll from malnutrition has hit 251, including 108 children. Images of skeletal Palestinians have flooded the internet, and the United Nations World Food Programme has categorised food shortage in Gaza as \u201ccatastrophic\u201d.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, according to the UN, the Israeli military has killed at least 1,760<\/a> Palestinians since late May alone, as they sought aid, including at sites run by the nefarious so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Backed by the US and Israel, the GHF has not only served Israel\u2019s plans for mass displacement and forced eviction of Palestinians; the aid distribution hubs have also functioned as a sort of one-stop shop for indiscriminate killing<\/a> \u2013 which, after all, is the whole point of genocide.<\/p>\n

And while Trump has intermittently chided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the disagreeable optics of the whole spectacle, it has not been sufficient to appease the scrutiny of the likes of right-wing US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene<\/a>, a traditional ally of the president known for such antics as wearing a hat imprinted with the words \u201cTrump Was Right About Everything!\u201d<\/p>\n

In a social media post last month, Greene \u2013 a leading figure in Trump\u2019s MAGA movement \u2013 was unexpectedly explicit in her condemnation of \u201cthe genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza\u201d. Other MAGA fixtures like far-right influencer Laura Loomer \u2013 a self-defined \u201cproud Islamophobe\u201d and general bona fide sociopath \u2013 wasted no time in responding to Greene\u2019s post: \u201cThere is no genocide in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyway, political tensions and infighting were at least temporarily removed from the spotlight by the Trump-Putin extravaganza in Alaska. It\u2019s hardly the first time the old art of distraction has come in handy \u2013 Trump\u2019s pal, Netanyahu, is the master of this trade. His commitment to waging genocide in Gaza has more than a little to do with his desire to stave off domestic opposition and avoid dealing with the assorted corruption charges<\/a> in which he is presently embroiled.<\/p>\n

And while the Alaskan red-carpet stunt provided little to write home about, distraction may yet prevail as folks ponder what the hell that was all about.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Bel\u00e9n Fern\u00e1ndez is an <\/em>Al Jazeera columnist and <\/em>a contributing editor at <\/em>Jacobin Magazine. She has written for the<\/em> New York Times, London Review of Books, Current Affairs, and<\/em> Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications. She is the author of <\/em>Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), <\/em>Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), <\/em>Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and <\/em>The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 Aug 2025\u00a0– Trump needed a break from the infighting in MAGA so he decided an inconsequential meeting with Putin would do the trick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":301518,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[2944,253,278,249,961,70],"class_list":["post-301517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-alaska","tag-putin","tag-russia","tag-trump","tag-ukraine","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301519,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301517\/revisions\/301519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}