The Photo Trump Is Dreaming Of

Will he get his three-way handshake?

Thomas Jefferson once called the American presidency a “splendid misery,” a graceful way of saying that the job comes with its perks — even more now than in Jefferson’s day — but often ends up being a four-or-eight-year run of headaches.

The office’s current occupant would probably agree. Donald Trump frequently complains about the various forms of acclaim and recognition he thought the presidency would bring him, but he has so far been deprived of. You sometimes get the sense that the job isn’t quite as as he imagined it before plunging headfirst into the political arena.

And then, other times, you get the sense that it’s exactly as he dreamed it. One such moment came last month, when Trump welcomed the leaders of long-fighting Armenia and Azerbaijan to the White House, where they committed to a peace deal christening a transit corridor, to be named (no, really) the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.”

You can watch at 18:17 in this video, as Trump happily motions to the president of Azerbaijan. “Come over here,” he says, urging the Azerbaijani leader to shake hands with his Armenian counterpart. The two follow his instructions, and then Trump grabs their hands as well. Trump then bared his teeth and grinned, looking as much like a triumphant WWE wrestler as anything.

Trump is a master of optics, and he clearly organized the photo to look like other presidential three-way handshakes throughout history, including these iconic shots of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton:

Lately, Trump has been on the hunt for another three-way handshake photo to cement his presidential legacy: between himself, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Trump has been agitating for Putin and Zelensky — who have been at war with each other since Putin invaded Ukraine three and a half years ago — to sit down with him together, a meeting he believes can end the conflict.

So far, that prize has remained elusive, which means Trump has had to settle for the next best thing: meeting with Putin (which he did last Friday in Alaska) and then Zelensky (which he will today in the Oval Office), in hopes of coaxing them into a joint summit.

Because the Putin meeting, predictably, did not yield a peace deal, it has been deemed a failure by many Democrats. And that’s fair enough, insofar as that was Trump’s stated goal for the Alaska trip. But, removed from Trumpian hype, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to meet with both sides separately to hear their opening demands as a starting place for negotiations; indeed, careful readers will remember that Theodore Roosevelt did exactly that before becoming the only U.S. president to win a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a war. (Trump’s problem, of course, is that every summit is always presented as the meeting that will clinch a deal! He doesn’t have much patience for starting points and back-and-forth offers, the grinding work of diplomacy.)

What did we learn from the Alaska summit? Putin’s maximalist opening demand: that he be able to walk away with control of the Crimean peninsula attached to southern Ukraine, the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine (despite the fact that he does not control all of Donetsk), and the parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces he currently controls further south.

In exchange, Putin said that he would stop trying to take over any more Ukrainian territory, and (according to Trump envoy Steve Witkoff) that he would allow the U.S. and European nations to offer “Article V-like protection” to Ukraine. (Article V is the part of the NATO Treaty that says that an attack against one member state “shall be considered an attack against them all. If Putin actually made such a concession, it would mean that — although he remains opposed to Ukraine joining NATO — the relevant countries could give Kyiv comparable security guarantees under the deal.)

Map by the BBC

There is clearly more that went on in the summit that we still aren’t privy to. After Trump, Putin, and a handful of their emissaries met, there was supposed to be a lunch between the two presidents and a larger group of their advisers. (Per NPR, which obtained the planning documents after they were left at a hotel, filet mignon and halibut olympia were going to be served.) But the lunch was canceled without explanation.

The planning documents also showed that the Trump-Putin press conference was set to last an hour; it ended up lasting a terse 12 minutes. Unusually for Trump, he took no questions from reporters.

With Trump’s orbit so famously leaky, I find it odd that we still don’t know why the summit ended so abruptly; perhaps we’ll learn more in the coming days.

In the meantime, Trump seems to have embraced at least two of Putin’s demands, per a Truth Social post last night: Russia formally taking over Crimea, and Ukraine remaining out of NATO. (No mention of “Article V-like” security guarantees there.)

However, it’s hard to know whether this apparent move to side with Putin against Zelensky is permanent, or merely the continuation of a pattern I noted on Thursday: Trump’s proclivity, particularly in this conflict, to take the side of whoever he met with last.

The only real exception to this pattern came after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Zelensky in March, which ended in a blowup between the two leaders — and, interestingly, also a lunch that was never held.

In an attempt to avoid a second implosion, Zelensky will be joined at the White House today by some serious backup: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

(Also, Zelensky will be wearing a suit. Or, more accurately, as a source told Axios: “It is going to be ‘suit-style’ but not a full suit.” Never say that statesmanship can’t also be childish.)

That list of European leaders includes several of Trump’s favorites: Stubb is a golf buddy. Meloni is an ideological ally. Rutte has called Trump “Daddy.”

I wrote back in February that prime ministers and CEOs alike all seem to use the same playbook when they try to charm Trump — and, strangely, even though he must know they’re doing it, it still seems to work fairly often.

In that vein, this is another perfectly transparent effort to get Trump on Zelensky’s side, by surrounding him with leaders Trump is known to like. Perhaps anticipating mockery on this score, Trump has put out three Truth Social posts in the last 24 hours insisting that, actually, it is a “great honor” to have them all. (“We have never had so many European Leaders here at one time,” Trump noted.)

So, perhaps the well-worn playbook will work once again. The real test will be Trump’s comments immediately after the meeting, when we’ll see whether Trump remains as tough on Zelensky in person as he does online, or whether he flip-flops once again.

Just as Trump set high expectations for the Putin meeting (which were not met), he has a lofty goal today as well: per the Washington Post, he wants his three-way meeting with Putin and Zelensky to be held by the end of this week, which would be a remarkably quick turnaround time for a summit of that nature.

“They’re going to set up a meeting now between President Zelensky and President Putin,” Trump told Sean Hannity on Friday. “And myself, I guess.”

“Not that I want to be there,” he hastened to add. “But I want to make sure it gets done.”