If Trump somehow gets elected President again, Putin is going to have a friend in the White House,
CNN reports, "It's not just that
Donald Trump recently hailed the "genius" of Putin's strike against Ukraine. Since his political career began, Trump has backed Putin in ways connected directly to the Russian's quest to subjugate that country.
"
Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine the following year. Protests in Kyiv had forced a Kremlin ally to quit the presidency. The ousted president, who fled to Russia, had been advised by an American political consultant. That consultant, Paul Manafort, subsequently became Trump's 2016 campaign manager.
"Candidate Trump spoke forgivingly about Russia's violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. He mused about lifting sanctions to smooth relations with Putin."
"The people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,"
Trump told ABC News in July 2016. That had been Putin's justification for the invasion.
CNN continued, "President Trump sought to undo one punishment imposed on Putin by
proposing that Russia rejoin the G7, an organization of the world's major industrial economies.
"His administration implemented some
new sanctions on Russia at the insistence of national security officials and Congress. Trump himself objected. In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it and saying we were being too hard," his former national security adviser
John Bolton.
"Trump cast doubt on America's decades-old
commitment to defending European partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Aides feared he might try to
withdraw from NATO if he won a second term.
"He fomented discord at home, advancing Putin's objective of sapping American resolve. "Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people," his former Defense Secretary
James Mattis said in 2020.
"Trump shielded Russia from opprobrium. Echoing Russian propaganda, he led fellow Republicans in
smearing Ukraine by falsely suggesting that Kyiv rather than Moscow had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election."
At Helsinki Trump rejected American intelligence and accepted Putin's word that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election.
Putin isn't to blame for the war in Ukraine, according to Trump. Biden is.
'While we need to help stop this brutal invasion, we also have to clean out the rot of our failed foreign policy establishment -- it is indeed rotten to the core -- before these total lunatics lead us down the path of national ruin and World War III," Trump said at a recent rally in South Carolina.
www.nytimes.com
www.cbsnews.com
