Oh Great. How US Officials Try to Brief Trump to Meet With Putin

US officials have prepared briefing binders to help prepare their president for his one on one meeting with Vlad Putin.  However, recognizing that Trump isn't a reader, especially when it comes to briefing books, they've fallen back on grade school level communications, essentially tweets. From the LA Times.

Here's one to inform Trump about Putin:

"Putin was and is a KGB officer, and KGB officers are specialists at one thing: seduction, how to persuade others to do what you want."

 Advisors including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James N. Mattisare trying to carefully script Trump’s interaction to head off any attempt by Putin to manipulate the encounter to his advantage, the U.S. officials said.

Putin is known to prepare assiduously for such high-stakes encounters with foreign counterparts, developing a command of policy objectives and honing a strategy to extract concessions, one U.S. official said.

John Herbst, a foreign policy expert at the Atlantic Council and a U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under President George W. Bush said, “The odds are the atmosphere will be good because our president seems to love Putin, even though it is bad policy.”

Herbst, who as a career foreign service officer helped prepare presidents and secretaries of State before such high-stakes interactions, suggested that Putin will try to establish a personal connection with Trump, who is widely seen among his global counterparts as particularly susceptible to flattery. And Putin will want to convince Trump that Russia is not a danger and NATO is “not as important” as Trump’s advisors say, Herbst said.

The White House said Tuesday that Trump and Putin will have a "normal bilateral meeting" Friday afternoon during the G-20 summit. That implies a longer, more formal meeting than the conversation he will have with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, as well as other "pull aside" meetings with the leaders of Mexico, Japan and several other countries that day.

Putin is expected to look for ways to further undermine NATO and exploit divisions within, such as the tension between Trump and Merkel evident at the NATO summit and after Trump’s disavowal of the Paris accord on climate change. She told reporters in Germany that the G-20 meetings would be “thorny.”