'The gorilla in the room': Inside Trump's failed efforts to meet Putin in 2013
By Philip Rucker May 16 at 6:57 PM
They called it “the gorilla in the room.”
Donald Trump’s desire to meet Vladimir Putin was so fierce that as Trump and his team prepared for their 2013 trip to Moscow to host the Miss Universe pageant they strategized about how the American reality-television star might be able to huddle with the Russian president.
As soon as the deal was struck for Miss Universe to take place in Russia, pageant president Paula Shugart told Rob Goldstone, a publicist and fixer who helped bring the pageant to Russia, “Oh, God, he’s going to want to meet Putin,” according to Goldstone’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee released Wednesday. “It was the gorilla in the room that had to be addressed, but there seemed to be no answer to address it,” Goldstone told the committee.
Negotiations for a face-to-face meeting began with a written request from Trump Tower to the Kremlin, included a personal call with Putin’s top spokesman and “went down to the wire,” Goldstone recalled. Once Trump landed in Moscow, he lavished praise on Putin (“strong”) as compared to then-U. S. President Obama (“weak”) at a reception.
Trump and Putin did not end up meeting because, according to Goldstone, Putin was too busy receiving the new king of Holland. Still, details about the American businessman’s failed courtship of the Russian autocrat — some of which were freshly revealed in Goldstone’s testimony and others that were reported by The Washington Post two years ago — illustrate the depth and tenure of Trump’s infatuation, which predated the 2016 presidential campaign during which he routinely praised Putin.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-gorilla-in-the-room-inside-trumps-failed-efforts-to-meet-putin-in-2013/2018/05/16/1b88fd8c-5920-11e8-b656-a5f8c2a9295d_story.html