Putin swings and misses
Putin is now sanctioning Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden, two people who won’t be impacted by such sanctions one bit. This is a purely symbolic move, which gives Putin no actual advantage or leverage and is instead merely aimed at playing to the Fox News crowd.
Donald Trump tried to win in 2020 by employing that same strategy: play solely to right wing media, enjoy the resulting adoration from right wing idiot supporters, and completely ignore reasonable people in the middle. Someone should ask Trump how that strategy worked out for his career – if they can even find Trump, now that he’s rotting away in relative obscurity.
What’s remarkable is that Putin was a savvy and successful political villain for decades, and nearly always won (or made mistakes that were survivable). In contrast Donald Trump never understood how politics worked. He only ever made moves aimed at pumping up his own base so they’d stroke his ego. As a result he lost by millions of votes in 2016, and was only put over the top by a combination of external factors, including Putin’s savvy disinformation campaign. Trump learned nothing from the sheer ineffectiveness of his 2016 campaign, and lost by twice as many votes in 2020.
Yet now that Putin’s puppet Trump has completely failed, Putin himself seems to be adopting ineffective Trump-like tactics. Sanctioning Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden doesn’t get him any support anywhere in the world. The American right wingers who are going to get a kick out of that are the same people who already support a thug like Putin. All it does is call attention to the fact that Putin didn’t sanction Donald Trump or any of his allies, which will cause mainstream Americans to further write off Trump as a Russian asset. Putin just isn’t good at anything anymore, and we need to be asking why.
