Ordinarily, when it comes to U.S. diplomacy, the role played by interpreters tends not to be notable. When it comes to the Trump administration and meetings with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, however, the usual rules don’t seem to apply.
The Washington Post reported in 2019, for example, that Donald Trump had gone to “extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations” with Putin, at one point even “taking possession” of his own interpreter’s notes after a conversation with the Russian leader.
This came to mind six years later after seeing this NBC News report.
President Donald Trump’s special envoy broke with long-standing protocol by not employing his own interpreter during three high-level meetings with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, opting instead to rely on translators from the Kremlin, a U.S. official and two Western officials with knowledge of the talks told NBC News. Steve Witkoff, who has been tasked with negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, met with Putin in Moscow for several hours on Feb. 11, on March 13, and in St. Petersburg on April 11, and “used their translators,” one of the Western officials said.
NBC News’ report added that Witkoff, by relying on Kremlin interpreters, “ran the risk that some of the nuance in Putin’s messages was missed and he would not have been able to independently verify what was being said to him, two former American ambassadors said.”
Fox News asked Sen. Tom Cotton for his reaction to the allegations, and the Arkansas Republican said Witkoff is “doing what the president has asked.”
I suppose that’s true, though it doesn’t negate the underlying concerns.
At face value, it’s an ongoing question as to why Witkoff is tackling these tasks in the first place. We are, after all, talking about a New York real estate developer with no meaningful experience in foreign policy or delicate international diplomacy, someone who’s been dispatched to work on Iran’s nuclear policy and negotiating an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The billionaire’s amateurishness has been a routine problem. For example, Witkoff apparently considered it a major breakthrough when Putin gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump that Putin had commissioned by a “leading” Russian artist.
Similarly, Witkoff, pointing to areas of Ukraine seized by the Russian military, recently declared, “They’re Russian-speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.” Whether the amateur diplomat understood this or not, he was referring to fake, orchestrated Russian referendums as if they were real — but they were not. Complicating matters, Witkoff has acknowledged — out loud and on the record — that he doesn’t fully know what he’s doing. “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure,” Witkoff told Tucker Carlson in March. “I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought about it. Like, I’m going to roll in there on a white horse. And no, it was anything but that, you know.” Is there really no one else in Trump world who could do this critically important work?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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