REVOLUTION: We thought we heard something at the summit!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 2025

As it turned out, we were right: It has now been a full week since the Subarctic Summit. On that occasion, the leader of a revolutionary movement flew north to Alaska, in Fabian's wake, to meet with Vladimir Putin.

Since that time, his focus has shifted. He has moved on from peace in Ukraine to the pledge he made yesterday—his pledge to install new grass in all of Washington's parks.

The parks will have "all new grass," Pam Bondi has pitifully said. This is the transparently silly and childish world into which this former nation has fallen.

The trip to Alaska occurred last Friday. The revolutionary leader flew north speaking of a ceasefire, returned with a whole different outlook. 

Also, the leader has said that President Putin told him that mail-in voting can never work. On that basis, the president has vowed that mail-in voting must be made to perish from the earth—a campaign he's advancing with his standard factual claims which are clownishly inaccurate.

For ourselves, we're so old that we can still remember the Stumblebum Summit! That said, dreams of Ukraine have given ways to dreams of parks with all new grass, and a front-page analysis piece in the New York Times now carries this gloomy headline:

Trump’s Bold Talk Aside, Russia and Ukraine Remain Miles Apart on Peace

How did it ever get this far? That's what Don Corleone once asked.

In print editions, the front-page headline on that piece is a bit less frank. All in all, though, it may turn out that "all new grass" is amazingly easy, while dealing with Putin is hard.

The revolutionary leader had flown north with visions of a ceasefire dancing in his head. He had been divinely appointed to his office, Pete Hegseth's pastor had said.

By the time the summit was over—after the scheduled luncheon was cancelled—the Fox News Channel's Jacqui Heinrich seemed to be saying that things didn't seem to have gone real well. 

We give Heinrich high marks for making Fox News viewers hear the statements shown below. As she ended a gloomy synopsis, she was taking about the way things had seemed during the day's extremely brief press event, right at the end of the summit:

HEINRICH (8/15/25): ...It was just very unusual, atypical, and I think we're all awaiting the read-out, because the way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well, and it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled—got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left. 

Of course, that is only the piece of the picture that we have right now, and certainly President Trump, who is the host and who is the president, would not want to, I think, enable something that would make him look weak. But we are eagerly awaiting to hear the background on that.

That was the end of a much longer statement; to peruse the full text, click here. That sad:

To Heinrich, the whole thing didn't seem to have gone well. At the press event, Putin had steamrolled, and then he had left. She almost made it sound like a certain revolutionary leader had been made to seem weak. For videotape pf her full remarks, you can just click this.

What had happened at that brief press event? What had the two titans said?

As we noted in Monday's report, President Putin had "steamrolled" ahead for almost nine minutes. President Trump then spoke for three.

In that same report, we reported what we thought we had heard as President Trump spoke. We referred to the "desperation friendship" he seemed to be trying to maintain with his new darling, President Putin. 

For us, we thought we heard the sound of that delusional behavior after Putin conducted his steamroll. It started when Trump said this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/15/25): Well, thank you very much, Mr. President. That was very profound. And I will say that I believe we had a very productive meeting. There were many, many points that we agreed on. Most of them, I would say. A couple of big ones that we haven't quite gotten there, but we've made some headway.

So, there's no deal until there's a deal. I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate. And I'll, of course, call up President Zelenskyy and tell him about today's meeting. It's ultimately up to them. They're going to have to agree with what Marco and Steve and some of the great people from the Trump administration who've come here, Scott and John Ratcliffe, thank you very much.

But we have some of our really great leaders. They've been doing a phenomenal job. We also have some tremendous Russian business representatives here. And I think, you know, everybody wants to deal with us. We've become the hottest country anywhere in the world in a very short period of time. And, we look forward to that. We look forward to dealing—we're going to try and get this over with. We really made some great progress today.

I've always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin—with Vladimir. 

To our ear, it started with that first reference to "Vladimir"—with that first desperation use of his dear friend's first name. It sounded like desperation to us—and it sounded like a delusion.

To see the steamroll and President Trump's rejoinder, you can just click here. You can see how that first name-call sounds to you.

For ourselves, as the revolutionary leader continued, we thought we heard his "desperation fawning" grow:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (continuing from above): I've always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin—with Vladimir. We had many, many, tough meetings, good meetings. We were, interfered with by the "Russia, Russia, Russia" hoax. That made it a little bit tougher to deal with.

But he understood it. I think he's probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He's seen—he's seen it all. But we had to put up with the "Russia, Russia, Russia" hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax.

But what was done was very criminal. But it made it harder for us to deal as a country in terms of the business and all of the things that we'd like to have dealt with. But we'll have a good chance when this is over. So just to put it very quickly, I'm going to start making a few phone calls and tell them what happened.

But we had an extremely productive meeting, and many points were agreed to. And there are just a very few that are left.

Some are not that significant. One is probably the most significant, but we have a very good chance of getting there. We didn't get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.

I would like to thank President Putin and his entire team, whose faces who I know in many cases otherwise. Other than that, who's whose faces I get to see all the time in the newspapers. You're very—you're almost as famous as the boss. But especially this one right over here. But we had some good meetings over the years, right?

Good productive meetings over the years. And we hope to have that in the future. But let's do the most productive one right now. We're going to stop really 5,000, 6,000, 7,000—thousands of people a week from being killed. And President Putin wants to see that as much as I do.

So again, Mr. President, I'd like to thank you very much, and we'll speak to you very soon and probably see you again very soon.

Thank you very much, Vladimir.

PUTIN: Next time in Moscow.

TRUMP: Oh, that's an interesting one. I don't know, I'll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.

Thank you very much, Vladimir.

He first-named "Vladimir" two more times as his three minutes mercifully ended. We thought we heard him protesting too much—insisting that the friendship really does exist as he reminisced about all the great meetings he had enjoyed with all those great Russian leaders.

Is something wrong with President Trump? Peter Baker isn't allowed to ask. We've asked that blindingly obvious question again and again and again.

For the record, we'll guess that our hearing is good! Last Friday, we thought we heard the markers of a "desperation friendship"—of an imagined friendship, a friendship that doesn't exist. And sure enough:

In the days which followed, darling Vladimir has continued to bomb kindergartens, hospitals, apartments and schools, even as his delusional counterpart has gushed about the peaceful happy feeling that obtained when his darling Vlad got off his plane in Alaska.

It can't be faked, he seemed to say, to the trio of friends at Fox. We're willing to guess that it can!

He has also talked about the way his darling Vlad 'very happily" picked up the phone when he called him on Monday. And dear God and all the angels and saints! This apparently delusional man actually said these words to someone we all should pity—to French president Emmanuel Macron:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

[Addressing the entire room]

Sit down. Sit down, everybody. I think we’ll let the press come in for a minute.

By Monday, he was even saying that! So go ahead, you mental giants! Go ahead and tell us that what we thought we heard last Friday was, as usual, wrong!

Is something wrong with President Trump? In the toughest parts of her best-selling book, Too Much and Never Enough, his niece the clinical psychologist said such things as these about her famous uncle:

MARY L. TRUMP (pages 12-13): In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as "malignant narcissism" and "narcissistic personality disorder" in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label only gets us so far.

[...]

A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe forms is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for. 

At present, "sociopath" isn't a clinical term. That said, at various points in her book, Mary Trump directly applied the term to the president's father. She also said that the diagnostic equivalent of that term might well apply to President Trump himself.

She seemed to say that her uncle's "psychopathologies" are numerous. All across the American press corps, it has been agreed that this part of her book, and this fairly obvious possibility, must never be discussed.

In other parts of her (very thoughtful) book, Mary Ttump explains the way the sitting president came to be the way he is. She displays great sympathy for the child whose mother took sick when he was just two,, even as she voices great concern about the highly "dangerous" adult.

With that, we offer a full disclosure. Try not to be embarrassed:

In her book, Mary Trump discusses, at some length, the difficulty her uncle came to have with respect to the ability to experience love. She explains this in terms of certain aspects of his profoundly unfortunate upbringing—in terms of his mother's absence due to serious medical problems and his father's overt sociopathy.

Pity the child, she seems to be saying, even as she says that we should we fear the dangerous adult. In the past week, the adult man has persistently described the delusional friendship he thinks he shares with his great friend and his darling, Vladimir Putin, whose feelings just can't be faked.

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, that's a great human tragedy. If so, what might the "psychopathologies" be to which his niece referred?

For better or worse, people like Peter Baker will never approach a medical specialist to ask some such question. It seems to us that the president's behaviors constantly suggest the presence of delusional thinking especially about himself, along with the presence of powerful fixed ideas.

During his first term, he maintained a "bromance" with Kim Jong Un, weirdly discussing the way the two had "fallen in love." That was dismissed as a joke at the time, but we thought we heard a desperation friendship this Tuesday when he talked about the peaceful easy feeling as Vladimir got off his plane.

The day before, he even said that his darling Vladimir was going to fashion a peace deal—that he was going to do that for him!

We heard the voice of Gretta Conroy when we heard him say that. One difference:

In Joyce's famous novella, The Dead, she was describing a real event. The president seems to be locked in a type of a fantasy

Our journalists refuse to discuss these manifestations. In effect, it's one major group of Palookas refusing to discuss another.

They refuse to discuss the apparent delusions. They refuse to center their work on the astonishing way he traffics in ludicrous misstatements of fact.

They refuse to discuss his possible paranoia, or the vast extent of his anger. When they would interview Mary Trump, they would stay away from such topics. Meanwhile, Dr. Bandy X. Lee is long gone from her position at Yale.

Our final thought?

We'll guess that the president's ultimate delusion may concern a delusional belief in his own cosmic greatness. According to his niece the clinical psychologist, he was being mocked as "The Great I-Am" by the time he was 11 or 12. She also describes the way his sociopathic father raised him to think that way.

The president has called himself "a very stable genius." Ludicrously, he boasts about the way he keeps acing cognitive tests which no one else could pass. Delusionally, he doesn't seem to have any idea of how transparently stupid this self-idolatry is.

He was raised this way, his niece says—he was raised to be drenched in such delusions. Our guess would be that he is somehow compelled to see himself as a colossus astride the world—as the equivalent of global strongmen like Putin and Xi, far superior to mere Euro leaders.

That would be an amateur's guess. People like Peter Baker won't speak to experienced specialists.

By Tuesday, he was describing the peaceful happy feeling when Vladimir stepped off his plane. For his part, Vladimir was still bombing hospitals every night. The president would soon move ahead to a promise of "all new grass."

A bunch of Palookas enable this gong-show. This is the way the world ends!