- Tucker Carlson said Vladimir Putin was “a couple hours late” for their Kremlin interview this week.
- Making people wait is a power move often used by the Russian president.
- Putin launched into a lengthy revisionist history of Russia that Carlson said “annoyed” him.
Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled a power move on Tucker Carlson that set the stage for the former Fox News host getting steamrolled.
In a post-interview reaction clip, Carlson said Putin was “a couple hours late” for his two-hour interview with the Russian leader in the Kremlin this week.
Making people wait is a tactic Putin has regularly used as a power play to show dominance over his guests, including world leaders.
Putin had former President Donald Trump wait for an hour before a summit in Helsinki in 2018.
He was about 50 minutes behind schedule for a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2015, Reuters reported.
And he also held German Chancellor Angela Merkel waiting for more than four hours at a private lunch in 2014, Radio Free Europe reported.
One Obama story I enjoyed was that Obama’s staff insisted that Putin had to get on the phone first, and wait for Obama to get on the phone. Obama couldn’t understand why it was a big deal, and just wanted to get on the phone so they could talk and he could get on with his day, but his diplomatic staff put their foot down, and so when they had a phone call scheduled, he would just assemble a bunch of work and sit down to work on it while no one was on the phone call that was supposed to be what was happening. After some long, long length of time, Putin would give up and connect to the call, and someone would tell Obama, and Obama would put down his work and get on the phone.
To me it perfectly encapsulates the weirdness of this kind of Trump-yanking-your-hand-around “power move” mentality. If you are stable then you’re either unaffected or repelled by this kind of thing. It is only the very strange who factor it into their future decision-making in anything like the intended way.