This Ukraine Summitry Is All Reality TV, Zero Substance

So much has happened in recent days, it’s easy to overlook how little has happened. To wit: Nothing material. Not when it comes to matters of war and peace in Ukraine, where Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to bomb civilians, to detain children (for which he is wanted by the International Criminal Court) and more generally to terrorize a sovereign nation that he considers an errant satrapy.

That, however, is not the impression you may have formed if, like me, you’ve been following the summitry and pageantry on YouTube, TikTok, X, Truth Social or your medium of choice. In the endless scroll of our screens, one meme chases another while all orbit around the bright yellow-orange star of the show, Donald Trump. The medium is the message, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed six decades ago. And the message today is that this US president — for better or worse — is shaping world affairs.

Here is Trump applauding Putin as the Russian leader approaches on a red carpet in Alaska. There he is again, receiving the rehearsed gratitude of the Ukrainian president and seven European allies, who rushed impromptu to the White House to contain whatever damage the KGB-trained Putin may have wreaked in Trump’s mind. There he’ll soon be again, if and when Trump gets both Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, into the same room, in what would be a “trilat” made for Reality TV.

Reality TV — and specifically The Apprentice — was of course the medium that, starting in 2004, catapulted Trump from relative obscurity onto the memetic platform from which he ultimately stepped into the Oval Office not once, but twice. Like so much in our zeitgeist, everything about this medium is sort of real and sort of not, kind of jocular and kind of serious, not quite substantive but always performative.

It is a universe in which Trump’s meeting in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy in February — when the American host berated and humiliated the Ukrainian guest — counted within the White House as a success because, as the president put it, it made for “great television.” Trump ran that script again during another visit to the Oval Office, when he trapped South Africa’s president in an ambush as devastating as it was riveting.

A virtuoso of the craft, Trump also incorporates voluntary or involuntary extras, bit players and cameos into his show. He mused about whether or not he would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities not at the Resolute Desk but on the White House lawn, where a work crew was erecting a flagpole and unexpectedly became the supporting cast in this particular episode. When weighing air strikes, or anything, Trump’s first question to his advisers isn’t about his options or strategic consequences. It is: “How is it playing?”

None of this would have surprised McLuhan, who analyzed (without judging) the role of media in the creation of reality, and did so when print and radio were old and television was new. Content, he understood, was subservient to the vectors in which it reaches human brains. A text-based culture rewards linear and logical thinking. Video (already in McLuhan’s time) instead turns politics into theater, shortens attention spans and favors appearance over substance.

As media change accelerated in the 1980s and 90s — during Trump’s formative years — other theorists elaborated on McLuhan. Jean Baudrillard, a French sociologist, saw that the media increasingly reflected not reality but what he called hyperreality, a world of “simulacra,” or copies without originals. In one memorable phrase, he said that “the map precedes the territory,” by which he meant that narratives trump (sorry) truth. That popped into my mind this week as Trump presented Zelenskiy with a map of Ukrainian territories now apparently up for negotiation.

Still writing before the rise of Fox News or TikTok, the American media theorist Neil Postman came closest to predicting the moment we are in today. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he argued that the new media would increasingly turn everything — from news to politics and war — into mere entertainment and spectacle. He foresaw a dystopia not unlike Brave New World, in which Aldous Huxley’s Soma takes the form of Insta feeds or Trump’s Truth Social.

So here we are, with two summits down and several more to go. We parse things such as, say, wardrobes. In the Oval Office in February, Zelenskiy was roasted for wearing the military-style garb he has donned since Russia invaded; this time he showed up in all black, and Trump agreed that he looked “fabulous.” A positive sign? Days earlier, the Russian foreign minister arrived at his Alaskan hotel with a sweatshirt that, in Cyrillic, advertised the “USSR.” Code for Putin’s imperialist treachery?

And all the while a tragedy is unfolding for those who dare to see it. The reality — yes, there still is one — includes these facts: The war that Trump once promised to end in 24 hours rages on. Trump keeps toggling between blaming Putin and Zelenskiy for it. By being ambiguous about US support, he has hurt Ukraine’s effort to defend itself. By ending Putin’s diplomatic isolation, Trump has made the Russian side stronger than it would be. And by giving Putin a deadline for a ceasefire, then letting it expire without the “severe consequences” he promised just a week ago, Trump forfeited the pressure he needs to exert now.

What’s new is that there are suddenly lots of meetings about meetings. What remains is that people are bleeding, crying and dying, all because of the decisions made by one man, Putin. In the minds of Trump and most of us in our brave new world, the map may seem to precede the territory. But that is not a luxury which people have, say, in Luhansk or Donetsk. Ukrainians and their friends are right to turn off their phones for a while, in the sad knowledge that nothing meaningful has changed.