President Trump raged against the “unfair” media over their coverage of his high-stakes summit with Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.
“Very unfair media is at work on my meeting with Putin. Constantly quoting fired losers and really dumb people like John Bolton, who just said that, even though the meeting is on American soil,” Trump seethed on Truth Social Wednesday.
“‘Putin has already won.’ What’s that all about? We are winning on EVERYTHING. The Fake News is working overtime (No tax on overtime!). If I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal! But now they’ve been caught,” he added.
Leningrad reverted to its pre-Bolshevik name, St. Petersburg, in 1991.
Trump’s anticipated meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson with Putin will mark the first time the Russian leader sets foot on US soil in about a decade. It will also be Putin’s first in-person meeting with a US president since he began the brutal invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has made ending the bloody war in Ukraine one of his top foreign policy objectives. Over recent months, he has soured on Putin over the brutal Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian civilians.
Critics such as Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton have argued that the president will be welcoming a “rogue leader of a pariah state” into the US and that Putin will attempt to “take advantage” of him.
The Friday summit meeting comes after special envoy Steve Witkoff met with the Russian leader at the Kremlin last week, ahead of Trump’s deadline for Moscow to move toward peace or else the US would work to cut off its oil exports using steep economic penalties.
Details about Putin’s exact conditions for bringing about an end to his country’s war are murky and have drawn confusion from European allies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly cast doubt on making significant territorial concessions to Russia and underscored that Ukraine must have a say in any potential deal.
The Trump administration is working toward a trilateral summit among Trump, Putin and Zelensky and sees the Alaska meeting as a step toward that goal, according to Vice President JD Vance.
One of Trump’s close allies, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, has claimed the president is “testing” Putin and trying to gauge his openness to peace.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio similarly implied that Trump is attempting to get a better sense of whether the Russian dictator is open to peace.
“The president talked to Putin on the phone three times or four times. Okay. And nothing has come of it — or at least we haven’t gotten to where we want to be,” Rubio told “Sid and Friends in the Morning” on Tuesday.
“So the president feels like, ‘Look, I’ve got to look at this guy across the table. I need to see him face-to-face,'” he added. “‘I need to make an assessment by looking at him.'”
