Opinion
MARK PENN: I'm watching Trump unite Europe while the media pretends it's falling apart
President Trump should be commended for pursuing a diplomatic solution to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia that has cost over a million lives
Mark Penn By Mark Penn Fox News
Published August 19, 2025 4:26pm EDT
The headlines were all over the news sites. Trump to push for concessions to the Russians. President Donald Trump got nothing from the Alaska Summit. Trump handing over a win to Putin. European leaders are coming to woo Trump. One headline after another dissing the president and his attempt to bring world powers together for peace in Ukraine. News analysts managed to find a negative angle to every single aspect of the attempted negotiations.
The reality is obviously different, and the headlines would have been different with just about any other president. Imagine if Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Barack Obama had pulled off meetings with all the combatants directly and in record time. The headlines would have been fawning in admiration, calling for a second Nobel Prize. But that’s not what happened. In fact, President Obama sat idly by while Russia rolled into Crimea in March 2014 – the real beginning of the problem. The Russian reset never happened. The red lines were crossed with impunity as the American deterrence withered.
As President Trump himself has said, these efforts may fail if Putin is unwilling to end the war, but the effort being undertaken at the highest levels is unprecedented. President Joe Biden could barely attend the G7 meetings and was caught wandering off into space during photo opportunities.
The previous president was not capable of the kind of top-to-top diplomacy needed to resolve complex world situations, and the U.S. was at serious risk because of that lapse and the reliance on aides instead. The real danger of the cover-up of the last president’s health was not in relation to domestic policy but the way it left the U.S. incapacitated when it came to foreign affairs.
Compare that to the country today. We see Trump taking meetings and initiating discussions that usually take months and years to set up. He’s pulled it off in days.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mark-penn-im-watching-trump-unite-europe-while-media-pretends-its-falling-apart
