Say you are the president of the United States and the relationship with a significant chunk of your political base has become less than blissfully harmonious. What do you do?Well, one option is to stage a summit, accompanied by much fanfare, with the president of Russia, ostensibly in order to end that country’s war in Ukraine.And this is precisely the manoeuvre that was pulled by US President Donald Trump, who on Friday rolled out the red carpet in Alaska for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The short-lived encounter was ultimately anticlimactic, with Trump offering the incisive assessment that “There’s no deal until there’s a deal.”Fox News reported that Trump had rated the much-anticipated meeting with Putin a “10” out of 10 and that he particularly “appreciated the Russian president’s comments when he claimed he would not have invaded Ukraine had Trump won the 2020 presidency”.Fox went on to add that neither head of state had bothered to specify the “reasoning behind these comments”.At any rate, the no-deal talks constituted a convenient distraction from current intra-MAGA strife, which owes to a couple of factors. There is, for example, the matter of the files relating to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.Wh …
