Watch this space

LMAO HOW DID WE MISS THIS pic.twitter.com/JXv2ionRqt

— Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) November 30, 2018

Watching Putin and MBS and their bro enjoyment of each other, high fives and all, he's like, oh, you guys think I'm a nobody because I never get to kill a journalist. Just wait!

Hard to believe that at the last G-20 summit, as the story of the Trump Tower meeting of 9 June 2016 was being revealed to an astonished public, Trump was unable to restrain himself, no matter how bad it looked in the circumstances, from having semi-secret discussions with President Putin—people watched them interacting, but couldn't find out what was being said—and at the current G-20 summit pretty much the same thing is happening!

Or not.

On Thursday, Donald announces from on board the plane to Buenos Aires that he's canceling the long-planned formal sidebar conference he was supposed to have with Vladimir Vladimovich. Not, ostensibly, with any connection to that morning's new guilty plea from Michael Cohen, establishing that Trump and his agents were trying to put together a Trump Tower Moscow deal for at least six months after Trump said no such thing was going on (and two years after Junior claimed to think the discussion ended) and that Trump had thus being lying outrageously throughout the campaign every time, and there were dozens, he said "I have no business in Russia"—no, he was canceling the sidebar because of the news of Russian aggression against Ukrainian ships in the waters off Crimea.


Whereupon press secretary Peskov (the same Peskov with whom Michael Cohen had so many interesting interactions in January 2016) issues a statement of regret:

“The Kremlin regrets U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Argentina and said Moscow is ready for contact with Trump, RIA news agency cited spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Friday,” Reuters reported.

And announces this morning that there will in fact be some sort of get-together on Saturday,

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin will have a brief impromptu meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Argentina just as he will with other leaders at the G20 summit, RIA news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Friday.

Which, 12 hours later, the White House seems neither to have confirmed nor denied.

Last year started looking (and still looks) as if Trump was desperate to get some help from Putin in concocting his story about the Trump Tower meeting. Though he certainly didn't do a very good job, as we know, and had to drop the cover story (it was a "meeting about orphanages") almost immediately when the Goldstone-Junior correspondence was published. This year looks like Putin is getting a little impatient with Trump, I don't know. I wanted to post this before we find out what happens in Buenos Aires tomorrow.

Photo by Juan Mabromata, AFP/Getty Images.

Clearly a communication to his drug dealer.