At the press conference, Witkoff and Kushner were asked directly whether they enjoyed sitting opposite Putin, described in the room as a war criminal. They were also pressed on the failure of every prior peace negotiation, including in other hot spots. Neither man lost his temper.
The Press Conference Test
They fell back on the line that war is a complicated question requiring long examination, and cited nine wars Trump had stopped, with this one to be the tenth. Senator Blumenthal had already said Witkoff and Kushner work poorly and treat Putin too kindly. The evasions are theirs, not the country's.
The tally is the argument, and the argument is thin: a count of stopped wars measures only pauses, and a tenth promised war measures zero won. Naming the tenth war doesn't answer why the first nine needed stopping, or who stopped them, or what the count leaves standing. The deflected criticism stays deflected.
Blumenthal's Verdict
Blumenthal had already reached his verdict before the August coalition-of-the-willing meeting, when Witkoff and Kushner looked visibly uneasy. His assessment: they work poorly and are too soft on Putin. The September press conference gave the claim its test.
American representatives sat across from a man called a war criminal. They were asked directly whether they enjoyed it. They were pressed on the failure of every previous peace negotiation, including in other hot spots. They handled the tough questions calmly. They said they were ready for pressure even from the American press.
Instead of answering hard, they noted that war is a complicated matter requiring long unpacking, and cited the nine wars Trump stopped, with this one to be the tenth. Blumenthal's earlier judgment stands against that record: not temperament under fire, but the softness of the position itself.
Hodges in Europe
Hodges lives in Europe. He fields near-daily questions from European friends about what happened to American checks and balances. His answer is blunt: corruption. The Trump and Witkoff families, he says, are trying to enrich themselves. That explains a policy that otherwise defies logic.
He cannot give a Ukrainian journalist a rational account of why the US helps Russia rather than Ukraine, because no such account exists in American interests. Putin, in Hodges's reading, played it perfectly: the Russians got their preferred political team atop the US at the critical moment.
The Arithmetic That Unsettles
His friends there ask him almost daily what happened to American checks and balances. They understand America. Every European schoolchild studies the US system, and Europeans long treated it as the gold standard of democratic governance even while knowing no democracy is perfect. What unsettles them is the arithmetic: 77 million votes for Trump's second term. They want to know how a system of separated powers, studied in their classrooms for generations, produced this.
The specific charge is against specific people profiting while Kyiv burns.
The point applies regardless of how the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump twice cast their ballots. Nor is it a verdict on the country Hodges still calls an advanced form of what awaits the rest of the world. When Hodges' friends ask, they are asking about a specific circle, not about the Americans who fund Ukraine and argue with their own relatives about it. Those two things differ, and the distinction
