Mr. Trump, “Tear down that Putin!”

That’s something my father might say at this point if he were watching Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy still struggling to end the bloody war in Ukraine.

Trump is in Alaska to meet face-to-face with Putin. Zelenskyy is waiting in the wings to wait for the big guys to decide the future of his war-torn country.

Supposedly, our president is going to get tough with Putin, the dictator of Russia and ex-KGB guy who specializes in lying, making his political enemies disappear and sending tanks into neighboring countries.

Trump has been warning he’ll impose serious economic sanctions on Russia if Putin doesn’t agree to end the war he started in early 2022.

We’ll find out soon whether our dealmaker-in-chief’s trip was a waste of jet fuel or a breakthrough that leads to an immediate ceasefire and a permanent peace settlement.

For three years Putin and Trump reportedly have had warm and friendly phone calls about the war in Ukraine.

Putin has made promises about ceasefires and pullbacks, but he’s broken them and proved to be a liar.

It is time for Trump to take the gloves off. It’s time to out bully the bully.

In Alaska Trump should tell Putin, “Here’s the deal, Vlad. Do what we say or suffer the consequences.

"Quit with the fake threats about using nuclear weapons. It’s time to stop this terrible war that you started. It’s time for you to go home.

"I’m tired of middle-of-the-night phone calls. And I’m tired of my wife saying, ‘Honey, every time you talk to that SOB, 24 hours later he’s bombing the crap out of Ukraine.’

"If you don’t stop the war in the next 48 hours and pull your guys out of Ukraine, I’m going to cut off your oil exports and cut off your international banking. I’m going to bankrupt you and give Ukraine everything they need to defend themselves.

"You get nothing now. We’re not negotiating with a guy who went to war illegally and runs a country that’s putting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children your soldiers kidnapped up for adoption on the Internet. That’s a war crime. We’re done with you.

"We’ll talk later about whether you can keep any part of the territory you’ve captured in eastern Ukraine — after you go home.”

It’s time we set the ground rules for bringing about peace in Ukraine. Not Putin.

What happens in Alaska should be like what happened in 1986, when my father met Mikhail Gorbachev at the arms control summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.

All his experts had told Gorbachev when he went to meet my father that the Americans always give in, which up to then was basically true.

But when Gorby said part of a nuclear arms deal meant that we had to give up our Star Wars missile defense system, my father shocked Gorbachev and the world and said, “Nyet.”

It’s time for us to say “Nyet” to Putin.

Now is not the time for us to go backwards – or for Trump to “go wobbly,” as Maggie Thatcher said to George H.W. Bush in 1990 when Bush was wondering whether to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

No one is afraid Trump will go wobbly. He’ll be happy to impose international sanctions that will bankrupt Putin’s Russia, whose war-weakened economy is in bad shape.

My dad never said it out loud in Iceland, but he basically made it clear to Gorbachev that “You can play my way, or I can bankrupt you.”

Trump can make that same promise to Putin in Alaska — and he should. The war in Ukraine he said he’d end in 24 hours if he became president has gone on for far too long.

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan