Washington: There was a telling moment in Donald Trump’s news conference earlier this week as he announced his public safety crackdown in Washington.

“It’s embarrassing for me to be up here,” he said. “I’m going to see Putin, I’m going to Russia on Friday [US time]. I don’t like being up here talking about how unsafe and how dirty and disgusting this once-beautiful capital [is].”

In the room, journalists exchanged glances over Trump’s gaffe – he is meeting the Russian president in the US state of Alaska, not Russia (the US purchased the land from Russia in 1867).

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are due to meet in Alaska on Friday.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

More interesting, though, is Trump’s psyche: he is going to meet a key world leader whom he sees as his equal, whose approval he craves and whose judgment he fears – even about the condition of Washington’s streets.

This is because, in the authoritarian tradition, Trump values order, strength, cleanliness, beauty, grandiosity. Whether it be gold-covered ballrooms, the palaces of the Middle East or “waterfront property” in Ukraine or Gaza, the aesthetic outweighs the historic, substantial or virtuous.

That can’t bode well for Ukraine as Trump embarks on his modern-day Munich Agreement, trying to placate Putin with enough Ukrainian land to secure a truce – for now at least – and declare another successful “deal”.

Despite their similarities as strongmen leaders of great powers, Trump and Putin’s Anchorage rendezvous is a meeting of two very different people. On one hand, Putin, who has done this for 25 years and prepares fastidiously for such encounters,........

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