President announces a Budapest summit with Putin after a two-hour phone call; the Ukrainian president learns about it on TV.

OK. Stay with me. Thursday morning. The phone rings. It is the Kremlin. The Russian President wants two hours on the phone with our President. He gets two hours. The two of them speak through translators. By the end of the call our President is on his social network announcing a summit. In Budapest. Hungary. With Vladimir Putin. In two weeks.

Buddy. Two things.

Thing one. The President of Ukraine, the country whose territory is in fact at stake in this conversation, is due to land in Washington the next day for a previously scheduled bilateral meeting in the Oval Office. He is in the air. He learns about the Budapest summit from the news, in the way that you and I learn about it: he opens his phone, he scrolls his feed, he sees that the President of the United States is about to fly to Hungary to make decisions about his country with the man who is invading his country.

This is the same playbook from August. The land swap. The summit-before-the-call-to-Kyiv. The deal happening in a room without the seller in it. I told you about this in August. They are doing it again in October.

Thing two. Hungary, as a host country, is governed by Viktor Orban, who has spent the last decade making Hungary the country in the EU that is most explicitly aligned with Moscow. Orban runs television, parliament, and the courts on terms that would make our own Founders take a long pause. Choosing Budapest is not neutral. Choosing Budapest is a signal. The signal is: this conversation is going to happen on terms friendly to one side.

Thing three. I said two things. Thing three is a freebie. The summit gets canceled six days later. By October 22 the President will have walked it back, citing Russian intransigence on territorial maximalism, which is the diplomatic phrase for Putin would not budge in the prep meetings between Rubio and Lavrov. Six days from announcement to cancellation. Six days during which the world rearranged its calendar.

I have run a casino floor. I have run high-stakes nights. The number-one rule of running a high-stakes night: you do not announce the room until the room is booked. You do not announce the seating chart until the seating chart is set. You do not get on the loudspeaker and tell every gambler in the building that Mr. Big is at table six until Mr. Big has actually walked in the door.

The President of the United States announced table six. Mr. Big sent his regrets. Six days later table six was empty.

I’m arguing with the television. The television is in Hungarian.