# Trump-Putin summer summit? Aye! **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 16, 2018, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trump-putin-summer-summit-aye/816189 "2018-06-16T03:36:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2018, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trump-putin-summer-summit-aye/816189/1 "2018-06-16T03:36:31Z")
[Susan B. Glasser at The New Yorker posted a story today](https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/theres-no-stopping-him-trump-insists-on-a-russia-summit) that says that Trump is actively seeking a face-to-face summit meeting with Vladimir Putin and that he wants it to happen ASAP, like this summer. > [@](#): > > Negotiations with the Kremlin have been under way for weeks. “There’s no stopping him,” a senior Administration official familiar with the internal deliberations said. “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.” > > Ever since Putin’s reëlection in March to another six-year term, Trump has been pressing for a Putin summit, dismissing advisers’ warnings about the political dangers of such a meeting, given the ongoing special-counsel investigation into whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia as it interfered in the 2016 U.S. election on Trump’s behalf. With the Russia allegations swirling, Trump never had the formal meeting he wanted with Putin last year—settling for just two brief encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings—but he has clearly never given up on his campaign vision of closer ties with the Russian strongman, whose autocratic rule he has often praised. > [@](#): > > Negotiations began in earnest, the senior Administration official told me, after Trump disregarded his aides’ “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” warning in his post-election phone call with Putin, in March. During the conversation, Trump both congratulated the Russian leader on his election—which Western election observers said had failed to offer voters a real choice—and issued Putin an invitation to the White House. After the call, the Kremlin quickly released word of the invitation and began publicly lobbying to pin down a date for a summit, but, privately, the Russian President balked at the Oval Office as the meeting’s venue. “Putin doesn’t want to come to Washington. Putin wants to meet in a third-party location,” the senior Administration official told me. “Originally, Trump didn’t want to do that,” but the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Putin asked Austria’s new hard-right populist Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, to arrange the summit for Vienna, and the White House is considering the proposal. > [@](#): > > “You know, we spend probably twenty-five per cent of our time talking about Russia, and I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if they were here?’ ” Trump told Baier aboard Air Force One. He went on to muse about how well he would get along with Putin, if only they could meet. “Now, I think I would probably have a good relationship with him. Or I will be able to talk to him better than if you call somebody on the telephone to talk,” Trump said. Will it happen? What will happen if it does? --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trump-putin-summer-summit-aye/816189)._