President cancels the Budapest summit six days after announcing it.

OK. Six days. That is the entire lifespan of the Budapest summit. Announced last Thursday, in the President’s voice, on his social network, after a two-hour phone call with the Russian President. Cancelled this Wednesday, also in the President’s voice, also on his social network, after a one-hour phone call between the Secretary of State and the Russian Foreign Minister in which the Russian Foreign Minister, by all accounts, repeated Russia’s position from August.

The position from August is the position from May, which is the position from the day after the invasion: Russia gets the four oblasts it currently or partially controls, gets Crimea, gets a veto on Ukraine joining NATO, and Ukraine signs the paperwork. That is the offer. That has always been the offer. The offer has not changed.

What changed, on Thursday, is that we believed it might.

Buddy. I have stories about belief. I had a guy at the casino, twenty years ago, who came in every Thursday and bet his paycheck on the same number. The number was twenty-three. He was sure about twenty-three. He had reasons. He had a system. The system did not work. The number was not twenty-three. It was never twenty-three. But every Thursday at four in the afternoon, he would walk in confident he had figured it out this week.

The Russian position is twenty-three. It has been twenty-three for forty months. We sat down with the Russian Foreign Minister this week and he reminded us, politely, that twenty-three is still twenty-three.

Now. Hungary, who had cleared its calendar to host. Ukraine, who had been put in the position last week of being briefed on a deal already announced. NATO, whose summit-prep team had spent the week on phones. The European Union, who issued sanctions on Russian oil companies on Wednesday morning, the same morning the summit was cancelled, in what was presumably timed to a summit that no longer exists. All of those calendars got reshuffled, on a global scale, for a meeting that lasted six days on the announcement page.

I have run a casino floor. The first rule of running the floor: you do not announce the room before the room is real. I keep saying it. They keep doing it.

I’m arguing with the television. The television, by the time you read this, is back to twenty-three.