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Trump Is Needier Than Ever, and Putin Loves It

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President Donald Trump’s neediness is giving the Kremlin ample ammunition ahead of his who-knows-what-will-happen meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Envisioned perhaps as a high-stakes drama sure to highlight Trump’s negotiating prowess, the Alaska summit set for later today has become a comedy of errors before it’s even begun. And the clearest sign of that might be Trump’s own declaration on the eve of the meeting that he’s the “toughest” negotiator former KGB officer Putin has ever been forced to contend with.

Putin has “never had to deal with anybody like me,” he told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade — and he’s probably right, just not in the way he thinks he is.

The farce began with the decision to host the sit-down in Alaska, a former Russian-controlled territory touted by some hard-liners in Russia as the next target in rebuilding the Russian Empire, and it gained momentum with Trump’s bumbling declarations leading up to the meeting.

By the time Russia’s delegation had already set off for Anchorage on Thursday, the Kremlin had hijacked the meeting’s agenda and turned the war in Ukraine into an afterthought, touting economic deals to be made and predicting breakthroughs in bilateral cooperation. So confident is Moscow in these deals that Putin’s finance minister will be coming along; his U.S.........

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