As Anita Kumar says, Trump can’t help himself when it comes to Putin: Every time the president has a chance to cast aside doubts about his relationship with the Russian leader, he does the opposite.
Putin’s puppet reported for his annual employee performance review at the G-20 Summit, and he did not disappoint his boss. Trump, with a grin, tells Putin: ‘Don’t meddle in the election’:
Putin noted that the two had not met since their first formal summit in Helsinki last summer and said the conversation in Osaka would be a “great opportunity to follow up on that.”
At that point, American reporters in the room began shouting questions about whether Trump would warn Putin not to meddle in future U.S. elections. “Yes, of course I will,” Trump replied. As reporters were being ushered out and still shouting more questions, a grinning Trump said: “Don’t meddle in the election.”
Raising his right index finger toward Putin, Trump repeated himself, while turning to watch the reporters depart.
“But seriously Vlad, I welcome your help again.”
The meeting with Putin appeared likely to renew criticism in Washington that Trump has jeopardized national security by not accepting and, at times, seeking to undermine the ample evidence that Moscow conducted a serious effort to interfere in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 and bolster Trump’s campaign. Ya think?!
Although then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III concluded there was not sufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the campaign, his 448-page report issued direct warnings over Russian interference. Mueller said Russia made “multiple, systemic efforts to interfere in our election. That allegation deserves the attention of every American.”
In a separate exchange, Trump said he and Putin had not yet discussed the event that prompted Trump to call off a scheduled meeting with him at last year’s G-20 gathering in Buenos Aires — Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian naval ships. Russia had fired on the Ukrainian vessels and captured about two dozen sailors, who remained jailed in Russia.
After the meeting, a White House readout distributed to reporters said the two leaders discussed Iran, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela, but it made no mention of election interference.
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When reporters first entered the room, Trump and Putin could been seen smiling as they discussed their mutual dislike of the news media, according to reporters in the room and a video posted by a service owned by RT, a Russian state TV network.
“Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it. You don’t have this problem in Russia but we do,” Trump said, according to Reuters.
“We also have. It’s the same,” a smiling Putin responded in English.
Under Putin’s government, press freedoms have been greatly curtailed.
“Curtailed“? Is this the euphmism reporters now use for murdered? Mark Sumner at Daily Kos clarifies:
[O]ver 200 journalists have been murdered in Russia under Putin, while dozens more have simply disappeared. And yes, they do have names. In 2018 alone, that includes a journalist who died after being hurled from an apartment window after reporting on corruption in the Russian government; a television journalist stabbed in the street after a commentary; a newspaper reporter missing for two weeks before his body was left for his friends; and an evening news host who mysteriously fell in a river and drowned on his way home from work.
It’s not clear if Trump shared his same concerns about pesky journalists with Mohammed bin Salman. But considering the level of the jokes he delivered in the opening day of the G-20, it seems entirely possible.
Trump and Putin met for 90 minutes, mostly without any journalists present. [Employee performance reviews are condiential.] Russian state media reported that Putin invited Trump to Moscow next year to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and attend a lavish military parade [Trump loves a parade!] The Kremlin said Trump “responded very positively.”
Asked about the invitation, a White House official responded: “The President believes it’s important to commemorate the Allied troops who lost their lives in WWII, as he said in June during the D-Day events in the UK and Normandy, but he has not confirmed participation.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that an official invitation for the Moscow parade would be sent to Trump “in the coming days.”
So the Kremlin candidate who recently welcomed election interference from Russia, again, is planning a state visit to the home office in Moscow in the middle of a presidential election? Geezus, people, what more evidence do you need? Trump’s not even pretending now. Are you going to wait until he signs a surrender and turns over the keys to the White House to his pal Putin?
Trump has tried to forge a close relationship with Putin during his presidency, but this has been met with skepticism by others who have questioned Putin’s motives.
Putin told the Financial Times in an interview this week that liberalism had “become obsolete” and “has outlived its purpose.”
Those comments were viewed as an attack on governments that elect their leaders democratically. Numerous investigations have found that Putin’s government interfered in the 2016 campaign in an attempt to tip the scales toward Trump, and other world leaders have warned that Russia continues to try to interfere in the democratic process.
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s office released a statement after her meeting with Putin, taking him to task for what it described as Russia’s efforts to destabilize democracies.
“She told the President that there cannot be a normalisation of our bilateral relationship until Russia stops the irresponsible and destabilizing activity that threatens the UK and its allies — including hostile interventions in other countries, disinformation and cyber attacks — which undermine Russia’s standing in the world,” the statement said.
That’s what America needs to her from its president.
Yet even as other leaders attempted to put pressure on Putin, Trump was focused on his rivals back home. . . “There’s a rumor the Democrats are changing the name of the party from the Democrat Party to the Socialist Party,” Trump said facetiously. “I’m hearing that.”
His senior aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, sitting across from their Brazilian counterparts, chuckled heartily.
Paul Krugman has a response to you chuckleheads. The S Word, the F Word and the Election:
What did you think of the bunch of socialists you just saw debating on stage?
Wait, you may protest, you didn’t see any socialists up there. And you’d be right. The Democratic Party has clearly moved left in recent years, but none of the presidential candidates are anything close to being actual socialists — no, not even Bernie Sanders, whose embrace of the label is really more about branding (“I’m anti-establishment!”) than substance.
Nobody in these debates wants government ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism used to mean. Most of the candidates are, instead, what Europeans would call “social democrats”: advocates of a private-sector-driven economy, but with a stronger social safety net, enhanced bargaining power for workers and tighter regulation of corporate malfeasance. They want America to be more like Denmark, not more like Venezuela.
Leading Republicans, however, routinely describe Democrats, even those on the right of their party, as socialists. Indeed, all indications are that denunciations of Democrats’ “socialist” agenda will be front and center in the general election campaign. And everyone in the news media accepts this as the normal state of affairs.
Which goes to show the extent to which Republican extremism has been accepted simply as a fact of life, barely worth mentioning.
To see what I mean, imagine the media firestorm, the screams about lost civility, we’d experience if any prominent Democrat described Republicans as a party of fascists, let alone if Democrats made that claim the centerpiece of their national campaign. And such an accusation would indeed be somewhat over the top — but it would be a lot closer to the truth than calling Democrats socialists.
The other day The Times published an Op-Ed that used analysis of party platforms to place U.S. political parties on a left-right spectrum along with their counterparts abroad. The study found that the G.O.P. is far to the right of mainstream European conservative parties. It’s even to the right of anti-immigrant parties like Britain’s UKIP and France’s National Rally. Basically, if we saw something like America’s Republicans in another country, we’d classify them as white nationalist extremists.
True, this is just one study. But it matches up with lots of other evidence. Political scientists who use congressional votes to track ideology find that Republicans have moved drastically to the right over the past four decades, to the point where they are now more conservative than they were at the height of the Gilded Age.
Or just compare the G.O.P., point by point, with parties almost everyone would classify as right-wing authoritarians — parties like Hungary’s Fidesz, which has preserved some of the forms of democracy but has effectively created a permanent one-party state.
Fidesz has cemented its power by politicizing the judiciary, creating rigged election rules, suppressing opposition media and using the power of the state to reward the party’s cronies while punishing businesses that don’t toe the line. Does any of this sound like something that can’t happen here? In fact, does any of it sound like something that isn’t already happening here, and which Republicans will do much more of if they get the chance?
One might even argue that the G.O.P. stands out among the West’s white nationalist parties for its exceptional willingness to crash right through the guardrails of democracy. Extreme gerrymandering, naked voter suppression and stripping power from offices the other party manages to win all the same — these practices seem if anything more prevalent here than in the failing democracies of Eastern Europe.
Oh, and isn’t it remarkable how blasé we’ve become about threats of legal persecution and/or physical violence against anyone who criticizes a Republican president?
So it’s really something to see Republicans trying to tar Democrats as un-American socialists. If they want to see a party that really has broken with fundamental American values, they should look in the mirror.
But that won’t happen, of course. Whoever the Democrats nominate — even if it’s Joe Biden — Republicans will paint him or her as the second coming of Hugo Chávez. The only question is whether it will work.
It might not, or at least not as well as in the past. By spending decades calling everything that might improve Americans’ lives “socialist,” Republicans have squandered much of the accusation’s force. And Donald Trump, who was installed in office with Russian help and clearly prefers foreign dictators to democratic allies, is probably less able to play the “Democrats are unpatriotic” card than previous Republican presidents.
Still, a lot will depend on how the news media handle dishonest attacks … Will we get coverage of actual policy proposals, as opposed to horse-race analysis that only asks how those proposals seem to be playing?
I guess we’ll soon find out.
As J.M. Rieger points out, dishonest Republicans have been tying Democrats to socialism for 90 years. Trump is going all in on the tradition.
Republicans linking Democrats and Democratic policy proposals to “socialism” or “communism” is nothing new, examples of which you can watch in the video above. But the tactic of “red-baiting” has roots in a near-century-long Republican campaign to discredit policies including Social Security, the G.I. Bill and Medicare.
Former president Herbert Hoover and the son of former president William Howard Taft warned that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal would lead to socialism.
Roosevelt’s 1936 presidential opponent, Alf Landon, ran an ad depicting the Democratic donkey (“the jackass”) corrupted by drinking Russian vodka.
In 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry M. Goldwater ran an ad against President Lyndon B. Johnson that included a clip of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, suggesting that U.S. children would become communists if Johnson were elected.
Politicians including Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Ronald Reagan, Bob Doleand John McCain all tied Democrats to “socialism” or “communism.” In the final two weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign, Fox News tiedDemocratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to socialism nearly three dozen times.
Now, after suffering their worst House midterm popular vote defeatsince the Watergate scandal and with a majority of Americans saying they will definitely not vote for Trump in 2020, Republicans are doubling down on “socialism.”
But whether continuing to use a decades-old GOP playbook on “socialism” will work for Trump in 2020 remains to be seen.