Opinion: Trump’s rendezvous with Putin could not look worse. Is he trying to be a political failure?

Was President Trump’s second, undisclosed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 meeting early this month a big deal, or just a little “getting to know you” session by a couple of world leaders? The only people who know the answer to that, unfortunately, are Trump, Putin and Putin’s translator.

That’s one problem — our impetuous president handed the Russians the opportunity to write whatever public script they want about what was said.

Another problem, though, is Trump’s obliviousness to the potential consequences of a little impromptu — if it indeed was impromptu — chat with Putin. And his disingenuous tweet Tuesday — “The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!” — only makes the president look more idiotic.

The issue isn’t the dinner for the G-20 attendees, but the quiet, and undisclosed, tete-a-tete with the man accused of meddling in the election that got Trump into office. And the investigations into the meddling and other possible connections between Trump’s campaign and Russians.

Serious, seasoned political figures would immediately have seen how such a one-off meeting with Putin witnessed only by a Russian translator would play out in the perceptions of a public already wondering how much the Russians sought to meddle in the election, wary of coziness between the Russians and Trump’s inner circle, and suspecting that Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns is an effort to hide evidence of Russian business connections.

Trump and his handlers, though, failed to see the minefield they laid for themselves. Trump at the least should have been warned away from a meeting without his own translator to serve, if nothing else, as a witness to what was said. By treating Putin’s presence at the table like that of just another guest at one of his country clubs, somebody to be dropped in on and glad-handed, and not disclosing the talk, was an unforced error.

And whatever spin the White House now embraces has little credibility, which is Trump’s largest self-inflicted problem.

Trump’s mendacity knows no bounds, and his serial lies make it impossible to put much faith in any pronouncements from Trump or his surrogates — including on such basic elements as how long the Trump-Putin meeting lasted. A White House spokesman told NPR it was a “brief conversation at the end of dinner.” National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton tried to dismiss it entirely: “”A conversation over dessert should not be characterized as a meeting.”

But Ian Bremmer, head of the political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group who disclosed the meeting on NPR’s “All Things Considered” — which forced the White House disclosure — said other world leaders at the dinner told him the Trump-Putin discussion lasted about an hour.

“It was very warm and friendly,” Bremmer said. “It was extremely animated. There was, you know, sort of a lot of hand gestures, gesticulations, that sort of thing. It was clear they were very close. It was clear that they were very much closer to each other than Trump is with any of his allies at the meeting, which I think is why they found it so disconcerting — and also the fact that it lasted roughly an hour.”

So who is the public to believe, an international political-risk consultant quoting unidentified sources, or the White House? The answer, unfortunately, is clear — and it’s not the White House.

Scott.Martelle@LATimes.com

Follow my posts and re-tweets at @smartelle on Twitter