Trump amazes while the media further diminish themselves.

President Donald Trump, center, participates in a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, seated at the table from center left, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and from foreground left, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, from background left, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, listen in the East Room of the White House, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

We saw something truly extraordinary this week – something without precedent in our 249-year history. It would be called impossible but for the fact that it really happened.

After convincing Russian president Vladimir Putin to meet face to face in Alaska last Friday at 3:00 p.m. Washington time (11:00 a.m. in Alaska), President Trump boarded Air Force One, got on the phone and convinced the leaders of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Finland, NATO and the European Commission to drop everything to fly to Washington be in the White House at 3:00 p.m. on Monday. That meeting was joined by Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The purpose was to seek an end to the horrific three and a half year-long war in Ukraine that is costing lives at the rate of about 7,000 a week. A war that has cost American taxpayers upward of $200 billion.

If you know anything about international diplomacy, you know it’s not like inviting the neighbors over for a spur of the moment cookout. High level meetings of the world’s leaders take months to organize. Staffers work on all sorts of minutiae prior to even announcing that a meeting is to take place. Agendas are debated. Topics to be discussed are agreed to. The size, shape and configuration of the venue is hashed out. Arrival times are coordinated, with serious debate among participants as to the pecking order of who arrives when. And of course, the topic of security is covered down to the smallest detail. It all takes weeks and months to work out.

Unless you’re Donald Trump.

If you’re Donald Trump you get every European leader to agree over the course of a weekend to meet in your office Monday afternoon.

Whether peace comes from all this or not – and it would certainly be “not” in the absence of such an extraordinary effort – the very fact that it even happened is amazing. None of these heads of state woke up Friday morning in their respective countries thinking that they’d be in the White House by midafternoon Monday.

If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had accomplished something so astonishing, the partisan hacks that populate the legacy media newsrooms would be in full swoon. Of course, neither Obama nor Biden would have even tried such a thing, both knowing full well that their personal standing on the world stage precluded even the fantasy of them convincing European leaders to drop everything to come running to Washington on a moment’s notice.

No, to the media’s lament, it wasn’t Obama or Biden or Clinton (or lol, Kamala) who pulled this off. It was the loathsome Orange Man. So, the media is doing all it can to minimize one of the most significant episodes in American diplomatic history. Never mind that it offers the chance of ending a war that has killed a million people.

With respect to the legacy media I once respected and aspired to be a part of I will say it again.

You cannot dislike these people enough.