Donald Trump’s speech to Congress just disproved his own premise for kissing Russia’s ass
Donald Trump, long the king of political insults, has always been willing if not eager to throw barbs at everyone from members of his own party to department stores. There is, of course, Trump’s one and only exception: he’s unwilling to say anything remotely negative about Vladimir Putin or Russia. We all think we know why. But after his speech to Congress last night, even Trump’s own longstanding premise for kissing Russia’s ass has fallen apart.
If you ask Donald Trump’s detractors, they’ll posit that he kisses up to Russia because the Kremlin got him elected, or because he’s deeply in financial debt to Russian banks, or because Putin appears to be holding embarrassing blackmail material over him, or all of the above. But if you ask Trump himself, or any of his supporters, they’ll tell you that Trump keeps things uniformly positive toward Putin because it’s vital that the United States maintain positive relations with Russia.
Neither Trump nor his base can ever articulate why. America doesn’t need Russia as a trading partner in any market segment. And Russia has proved to be fairly useless in the fight against ISIS, the terrorist group which President Obama and the U.S.-led military coalition largely wiped out without Russian help before he left office. But let’s say for a moment that there is some poorly articulated, misunderstood reason for why Trump honestly believes the USA needs a strong relationship with Russia. So where was it last night?
If Donald Trump truly believes that a strong relationship between America and Russia is so vital that he’s been willing to spend the past year and a half praising a murderous dictator like Vladimir Putin just to improve relations, then he would logically have used his first speech to Congress to make that case. It would have been the centerpiece of his speech, particularly considering how skeptical both parties in Congress are toward Putin and Russia.
Instead, Trump made no direct mention of Russia at all. In fact his entire speech felt like a prolonged attempt at getting Americans to forget about his Russia scandal by overemphasizing other unrelated issues. And in so doing, Trump just gave away the game. Last night he finally acknowledged that he has no valid reason for kissing Russia’s ass. His detractors, who believe he’s only beholden to Russia for dark personal reasons that must be exposed, should feel more emboldened than ever that the Russia scandal will eventually take him down. Help us investigate Trump-Russia!
