JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It may be President Trump's biggest gamble yet, an Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin meant to end the war in Ukraine that Putin himself started.

One person not in the meeting, the president of Ukraine.

Could Trump succeed or is Putin simply manipulating him?

We'll discuss this historic meeting next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

Presidents Trump and Putin have just finished their summit meeting and at a press conference in which the two leaders took no questions from the press.

President Trump made it clear that he likes President Putin very much, but he also said there's no deal until there's a deal.

We don't know yet what happened in that meeting.

We don't know if anything happened in that meeting, but we do know that there's no ceasefire in Ukraine and we know that Putin, just by virtue of being invited to Alaska, had a very good day.

Trump has been busy at home as well, attempting to seize control of law enforcement here in the capital.

The fight isn't only about Washington.

It's about using the military for domestic law enforcement.

Joining me tonight to discuss all this, David Ignatius, a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, Zolia Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The New York Times, Scott McFarlane is the justice correspondent at CBS News, and Vivian Salama is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Welcome to all of you.

Thank you very much for being here.

Let's go right to the big event of the day.

We'll talk about whether it was indeed a big event, but the two presidents did meet in Alaska.

They came out.

They did not seem to agree on the most important issues, namely a ceasefire in Ukraine or something more than ceasefire.

David, give us your initial assessment on what just happened.

DAVID IGNATIUS, Columnist, The Washington Post: So, Jeff, it's just a few hours after, and so these are very preliminary, but, you know, you could say this is the anti-climax in Anchorage.

We all had such expectations.

It's gotten intense media scrutiny and it seems nothing was agreed.

Trump's comment was, we didn't get there, but we have a chance of getting there.

I have an odd sense that given my fears about what might happen, that there might be a Putin-Trump deal that would then be rammed down the throat of Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine.

You could argue that no news is good news, at least for the moment, that Trump has said we, we talked about a lot of key issues, there's still points of disagreement.

He wouldn't say what they were.

He was not his usual, flamboyant, theatrical self, self-promoting, look at all the great -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Was that because of the seriousness of the nature of the event or because he came out with pretty bad news to himself?

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, I think there clearly is an impasse in these negotiations, which, to me, means that Trump is not willing to cave to what Putin wants.

Putin was very clear.

He still is focused on what he calls root causes, which is a kind of code for future limits on Ukraine's sovereignty.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: May I ask one more question about root causes?

As I understand it though, root cause for Putin is the existence of Ukraine.

DAVID IGNATIUS: The root cause is the Ukraine that wants to be part of Europe and that rejects Russia's hegemony and dictation.

And, you know, that is part of where they're stuck, you have to guess.

And the fact that Trump today didn't cave and said it, the first thing he's going to do is talk to Ukraine and his European allies actually found a good takeaway.

So, you know, again, you could say that, you know, they came out with no agreement, oh, that's terrible news.

Given the possibility of an agreement, that would be a bad agreement, I'm actually content with where they are.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Vivian, how do you read today starting with the red carpet and the enthusiastic-looking Trump greeting Putin?

VIVIAN SALAMA, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Well, Trump is someone who we know likes theatrics, in general.

Staging is part of that, and so that was a big part of it.

We saw flyovers for military jets as the two leaders approached the podium.

That's at Alaska 2025 in jumbo letters.

And so, you know, a lot of it was just that, was staging.

But, of course, you know, just the high-profile nature of this, Trump wanted it to be splashy because he knew that people around the world were watching this moment, regardless of what came out of it, just the nature of it, the fact that they were meeting in the United States for the first time in many years, and Putin almost being legitimized by a western leader.

It was significant.

I was getting messages, and I'm sure all of you were too from officials all around the world today.

All of them were watching play by play and not the White House got what it wanted.

Also, Trump remember, believes that speaking is better than not speaking.

And so he believes that addressing Putin, talking face-to-face, is better.

He wanted to talk to the Taliban face-to-face in his first term.

He talked to Kim Jong-un.

So, this is very much tracking with how he conducted things.

Whether or not he comes out with anything, that's another story.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Does he come out with anything?

ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS, White House Correspondent, The New York Times: As of right now, it doesn't seem like he came out with much.

I mean, he did get the show, right?

He did get the show, which matters to him.

And if you're an ally in Europe right now, to your point, David, I think you're probably breathing a sigh of relief that the president didn't come out and say something like Ukraine started the war, which we've seen him do in the past and absolutely is not true.

But, you know, even in the days leading up to this, Trump and the White House, they were lowering expectations for the results that would come out of this meeting.

I think they knew that there was a low chance that they would actually come out and have something substantial to announce that indicated progress to establishing peace in Ukraine.

After promising during the campaign to end this war in 24 hours, you know, the president has gone through stages.

He had his allies saying that he was getting played by Putin.

He got infuriated at Putin.

And now and then in the days leading up to this, he was trying to lower expectations.

And then today, you saw him not take any questions at all.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You cover him day to day.

How important is the cause of peace for him in terms of global acclaim, which is a euphemism for the fact that he -- everybody says he wants a Nobel Peace Prize very badly?

What motivates him to be engaged this at this level?

ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: That's true.

I mean, it's an accolade that he hasn't obtained yet, and he does want that.

You know, I'm sure we've noticed he's been talking more and more about his role in establishing peace in Congo and Rwanda, even though fighting has continued.

He's talked about his role with India and Pakistan.

Those are probably not conflicts that you thought were top of mind for the president coming into this administration or top priorities.

But it's about something else.

It's about establishing himself as a peacemaker on the global stage, even though he has yet to make substantial progress on the two conflicts that he talked about the most during the campaign, Israel and Gaza and ending this war in Ukraine.

He hasn't done that yet, but he feels that with an event like this, he can continue with this campaign to try and get a Nobel Peace Prize, which does matter to him.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, go ahead.

VIVIAN SALAMA: I was just going to say put also knows who he's dealing with this time around at the press conference, he said, you know, President Trump has repeatedly said that this war would never have happened if he were president, and I believe that's true, completely tapping into Trump's ego on this very issue, because he feels that Trump wants to be that peacemaker.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I want to ask Scott about that.

I noticed that as well.

It was -- they were both buttering each other up in a certain way.

You've watched President Trump operate for years.

Talk about the personality traits or the political machinations that you saw in the interaction, even the physical interaction between the two.

SCOTT MACFARLANE, Justice Correspondent, CBS News: I found some of this jarring.

If you think about the timing of how this unveiled itself, they chose, for whatever reason, to take the podiums and go before the world's view at 6:30 P.M. on the East Coast.

For the president's generation, for a lot of generations, that's the time to make news, the evening news hour across America, and they had little to say.

They had no capacity to make news.

And they didn't answer questions, which is so against the muscle memory of the president.

I just found all of this to be counterintuitive based on what we've seen with President Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, I want to stay on that because that's -- you are absolutely right.

He does like to talk.

He likes to riff and tell funny stories.

The fact that they walked out of there without taking questions does suggest that something pretty bad might have happened.

DAVID IGNATIUS: To me, it suggests that they're at an impasse.

And words I would rarely never before use about Trump are discipline and patience.

And he actually was disciplined today, rather than do his usual riff and, you know, do the wave and talk and talk and talk, he didn't say anything.

And rather than, you know, rush to make some kind of news, as Scott is saying, everybody expected, he had the discipline to say, I don't have anything to say now.

I'm going to talk to my allies.

So, those are unusual qualities for Trump.

In this situation, I'm actually glad that he's being careful and he's talking with others as they address this impasse.

I mean, it's clear that Putin, as he talked about root causes, isn't prepared to come off that demand to limit Ukraine's sovereignty, and that's a sticking point, as it should be.

And if he'd rushed to resolve it, I think it would add a bad outcome.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I understand your points, but, Scott, I also noted that the president could not help but talk about the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax in the middle of what should be the highest stakes meeting in the world, right, Russia, and claimed Vladimir Putin as an ally, without saying in so many words, that Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, was no friend of his on the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax and in helping him through his own political gain.

Did it strike you at all that he didn't have enough discipline to avoid the thing that really irks him?

SCOTT MACFARLANE: It may seem cryptic to so many people across the globe watching that, but that is such a direct and declarative shout out to the Trump base.

They know that is a reference to a criticism of President Obama, an allegation that he has been wronged throughout his political career.

It speaks quickly and efficiently to his audience.

You know, who else would like some declarative information?

How about the Congress, which will have to appropriate something for Ukraine, possibly in short order.

It's a wedge issue inside Trump's base.

You know, some of his supporters want to fund it.

Some of them do not want to fund it.

He didn't give any clarity on that today either.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to -- I want you all to watch, Zolan, you mentioned this a brief clip that -- from Monday press conference at the White House in which Trump, to my mind at least, doesn't seem to understand cause and effect in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Can we watch that just for one moment?

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying, well, I have to get constitutional approval.

I mean, he's got approval to go into war, kill everybody, but he needs an approval to do a land swap because there'll be some land swapping going on.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Zolan -- ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS It reminds me, I mean, going back to that Oval Office meeting where he dressed down Zelenskyy.

Here, not as bad, but you still see him putting the onus on Zelenskyy, the person who was invaded, the person leading this country that was invaded by Russia.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, I guess the question for those of you who covered diplomacy is, how can you go into a complicated negotiation when you yourself don't understand who caused the war?

DAVID IGNATIUS: So, you know -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You seem unusually sympathetic to the problems here, so go on.

DAVID IGNATIUS: I have been just so frightened that Donald Trump was about to obliterate Ukraine's sovereignty, and that could still happen.

This could still have a very bad outcome, but it didn't happen today.

You know, there're so many things about this conflict that he doesn't understand.

But there's one part that he clearly does, and that is the enormous loss of life.

He talks about it.

Every time he talks about Ukraine, he talks about the bloodbath.

He talks about the numbers dying every day, every month.

You know, I think he does feel that.

And when he says, I want to end this war, he means it.

You know, he didn't get to ceasefire that he wants, but I think it's still something he care about.

VIVIAN SALAMA: The other thing that's actually new that we've seen out of him, especially in the last week, is that he wants to loop in NATO allies.

He said it today after the press conference, and he also said it after Steve Witkoff, his envoy, came back from Moscow, where he immediately got on the phone with European allies and Ukraine.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That goes actually something David was pointing out, which there is a responsibility in that.

In ordinary precedence, of course it's assumed that he would call his allies.

But this is a man who doesn't like NATO.

VIVIAN SALAMA: This is the same president who shunned the transatlantic alliance.

DAVID IGNATIUS: What I've been hearing in the last couple days from Europeans is a surprising degree of, you know, enthusiasm about Trump looping them in, but standing a little firmer than they feared he would.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is that the soft bigotry of low expectations, or is that because they think he's actually going to get something done here?

DAVID IGNATIUS: I think they were afraid that he was about to sell Ukraine out.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Czechoslovakia-style.

DAVID IGNATIUS: They're reassured.

You know, the talk, you know, the last month among the commentary has been, this might be another Munich.

And, you know, today, we didn't see another Munich.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Let us pivot to a domestic military situation, the National Guard on the streets of Washington.

Scott, you've been covering this all week.

Can you give us a brief overview of why the Trump administration is so eager to put not only National Guard but federal agents across the streets of Washington?

SCOTT MACFARLANE: This is such a significant moment.

There's a tug-of-war underway for control of a major American police department, and there's a lack of clarity for the officers who's in charge.

Put that in perspective.

This is a police department of more than 3,000 people in a community of more than 700,000 people, and it's not quite clear to everybody who's running the show.

The site of military humvees, military members, Guard members, federal agents with masks walking through neighborhood streets in America is jarring to a lot of people.

But it's not a real clear public opinion on this.

It's not your traditional Trump issue.

One group on one side, one group on the other, not your traditional 2025 political issue, I should say.

There are many people with whom we spoke like extra law enforcement in their community.

School is about to reopen.

There's a big issue of crime.

People want to go to work in the store safely.

But this is different.

There's a concern that when Trump gets his fingerprints on a police department, he may not take his hands off of it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What is his underlying reason for doing this now?

SCOTT MACFARLANE: He's alleging a crime emergency is underway in the District of Columbia.

When pressed on the crime numbers and shown with the D.C. government has released, that there's a 26 percent drop in violent crime from this time last year, he alleges the numbers are rigged or the numbers are cooked, much like he did after the 2020 election or with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So, he's alleging there's a crime emergency that this is there to combat.

But for the people of the District of Columbia, who do not mind extra law enforcement, they're concerned, this is heavy handed and this is pernicious and this is not the right response to it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right?

I mean, Zolan, we -- people who know that long history of home rule in D.C. understand that this is a very, very fraught racial issue as well.

This is about giving the people of D.C. the right to self government.

This seems to be a kind of an old -- coming from an old playbook.

Is that fair to say?

ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: Yes it is.

And I think we, we can say that it also comes from a very Trump-specific playbook too.

We can't just look at the deployment of the National Guard in isolation.

We also have to look at Trump's remarks when he deployed the National Guard and how he described Washington, D.C., and how he described in broad strokes as well the people that are both crime victims and the suspects perpetrating these crimes, how he said that this city needs beautification as well.

These are comments that the present has made about American cities, mostly cities that are led by Democrats, mostly cities that are diverse, multiracial.

Going back to his days as a real estate developer in New York City, where he grew up in a New York City that was rampant with crime, I was talking to various historians in political experts today, one of which said, Trump's vision of American cities has remained this same since the 80s, even though the facts of these cities have changed over time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Port Apache, the Bronx, remember those movies, the Wanderers?

That's a very 70s, 80s -- SCOTT MACFARLANE: He's using dystopian language of marauding caravans of criminals.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And, by the way, I don't want to downplay, there's a serious crime issue in the District of Columbia, especially in poorer areas, but the question is the militarization of that.

Before you go, I just want you to watch one common, which I found very, very remarkable from Congressman James Comer, who is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

This is what he said about military.

REP. JAMES COMER (R-KY): We spend a lot on our military.

Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets trying to reduce crime in other countries.

We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that's what the president's doing.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Jeff, if this was, you know, something that was rampant or that was really kind of rose to the level in the eyes of D.C. as an emergency, then it would be one thing, but it is not lost on D.C. that the very crimes and a accusations that the president is lobbying against people in D.C. were also what happened during January 6th with regard to the assaults against police officers and other things that were happening that day.

And yet the president pardoned so many of those people who were charged by the Justice Department of those crimes, and yet here we are.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Are you suggesting that there's a bit of racially-tinged hypocrisy going on here?

VIVIAN SALAMA: There, there might be a double standard at play, and that is something that, you know, especially here in the capital, it resonates very much with residents.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Scott, you've covered this issue for a while.

Talk about that January 6th overlay to what's happening here, specifically as it regards the treatment of police officers by Donald Trump's supporters.

SCOTT MACFARLANE: Uniquely relevant, because it's the same community, it's the District of Columbia in both cases.

1,500-plus people were charged with being part of the U.S. Capitol insurrection, about 600 of them with assaulting police with clubs, baseball bats with bears, spray with their bare hands, some carrying guns or knives.

Roughly half of them pleaded guilty or were convicted of assaulting police.

But here's what one council member told me as the week concluded.

The D.C. police officers, included those who were beaten and watched their attackers get pardoned, they had to hear this week that there's new management, and it involves the person who pardoned the attackers.

And that is, to put it mildly, likely a problem for some people.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: David, you've watched politics in this town for a while.

Have you ever seen the city just absorbed the fact that massive numbers of police officers were assaulted by the supporter of the Republican president then pardoned by that Republican president when he comes back to power, and then everybody forgets about it?

DAVID IGNATIUS: People haven't forgotten about it.

The fact we're talking about it with such passion shows -- I mean, I've lived in Washington most of my life.

I've seen home rule rise and fall.

And I have to say, I was proud of our mayor and the lawyers who were representing D.C. both in understanding that they had to accommodate this initially, not -- don't fight it, just deal with it, and then fighting it on legal grounds.

And today they want a modest battle when a judge essentially rewrote the authority that Trump has to -- in having his DEA chief oversee the police.

That's going to be indirect now.

So, I think the district government, you know, in this dreadful moment, did a pretty good job.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Zolan, I'll give the last question to you.

Talk about the politics of this.

Because most voters don't like crime, most voters want law and order, Democrats, Republicans, black, white.

Could this be a winning issue, the deployment of military resources into the cities?

ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS: One, I think we have to remember, he wanted to do this in the first term and was talked down.

Those people aren't around.

They're now replaced by loyalists that will allow him to do it.

He's already forecasted that he could do -- want to do this in other cities as well.

Crime, yes, is a very, very poignant, you know, moving issue in politics, but do people want the federal government to crack down on them without them getting a choice?

That will be the question moving forward.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we're going to have to leave it there.

I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I want to thank you at home for watching us.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.