But there are a few things that you need to know about it. Number one, the president has now had practice. Practice makes everything better, right? It's hard to think of anything that doesn't get better with practice. So President Trump has had one summit with Putin in which he saw how people reacted to all the elements of it. What did people get excited about? What did people like about it, etc. Now he's going to get ready. He'll have plenty of time to get ready for a second one.

Does the president like to lose? He does not. Does he prepare as much as people think he should for big events? He does not. But if you give him a little bit of practice, does he elevate his game? Oh yeah, he does. You saw that in the campaign when his debate performances seemed to get better. And I would argue that his whole presidential thing is also improving with practice. So the second Trump summit is likely to go much better, even if the only thing that changes is how he manages the optics of the press conference and that sort of thing. It will just be way better. So the odds are this is a good thing.

Now what I love about it is that when people's hair was already on fire, and before the hair had burned down to their skull, they were still running around. The hair is on fire. Every hair was on fire. He takes control of the narrative by doubling down and saying, hey, once you come to the United States, Putin, and we'll have another meeting. And then everybody's like, what? Ah, double ah. So he has once again completely controlled the narrative. And now we're going to be talking about the future, because the past, we're already exhausted with the past. And when I say the past, I mean this past week, one week. But we're already exhausted with it. And he's given us new fresh stuff to talk about, which is the upcoming summit. So that part is good.

The experts are saying no, no, you should not meet with him. You should not invite him to the United States. But what was one of the big problems with the summit? It would seem to be that the president seemed to not have the status that his critics thought. He seemed like he had actually put himself at such a conciliatory place that it actually elevated Putin, almost like he was a little higher than Trump. That's at least some of the impressions that people were getting. I didn't see that, but a lot of people saw that when they watched it.

And so when you invite Putin to your country, who has the situational advantage? Who has the advantage? Putin, who is visiting, or Trump, who actually lives in the White House, lives and works in the White House? Putin is going to be on Trump's home turf. Trump will absolutely have the visual advantage because, you know, blah blah, White House, flags, symbols and all those things. And what will Putin have? His suit. Putin will show up with the clothes on his back in terms of what we see. So we're going to see Putin and Putin's clothing. That's it. That's all we'll see of Putin. But we're going to see the White House, the flags, we're going to see the military. We're going to see so much America surrounding Putin that the visual persuasion game will be won before it starts.

So I think it's a, and let me ask you this. In the business world, if you're the one who goes to someone else's office, who is the alpha? Is the alpha person the person who goes to visit the other person or the person who waits for the person to visit them? It's always the host. So Trump has won before he starts the second summit because the setup is just so favorable to Trump that it would be hard for that to go wrong visually.

Now you also have the advantage of low expectations. People thought that the first summit went so poorly, whether or not that's true. The impression is that it did. So Trump's bar that he has to cross to look like he's getting better at this or things are moving in the right direction, it's very low. Also a perfect situation. So he's got practice with lots of feedback and criticisms, lots of things to work with. He might have progress by then, meaning that presumably the meeting won't even happen unless Russia has delivered at least a little bit, right? Or at least has something to plan to announce at the summit. So it's very likely he'll have something that he can at least show as progress. He'll have practice, he'll have the home-field advantage, and he'll have low expectations. So things are set up for Trump to have a good meeting.