Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak takes Donald Trump’s ball and goes home
One of the people with the most influence over the Donald Trump administration announced today that he’s quitting and going home. No, not Steve Bannon or Jeff Sessions or even Jared Kushner; their resignations are still down the pike a bit. Instead, Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – who engineered the cheating spree that got Trump elected, and has been ostensibly pulling Trump’s puppet strings in Washington ever since – is officially done.
Sergey Kislyak is being recalled to Russia, which is a diplomatic way of saying that he’s quitting (source). He’ll be replaced by someone else as the new Russian Ambassador, of course. But in terms of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, this is like Tom Brady retiring and being replaced with… some random nobody who’s been riding the bench behind Tom Brady. I use the football analogy because Kislyak has been the quarterback calling the shots in Trump-Russia collusion from the start. And this means Vladimir Putin is more or less giving up on Trump.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. There’s an overly elementary misunderstanding that Putin was merely looking for chaos in the United States. But his goals were far more specific than that. He wanted the U.S. to be embroiled in the kind of chaos that would force it to focus inward, and absolutely not, as he’s ended up with, the kind of scandal that’s caused America and the West to focus on Russia more than ever. Putin wanted cover for invading the rest of Ukraine; now he sees he’s never going to get it while Trump is in power. He can also see that Congress will never let Trump remove sanctions on Russia, which was the other specific half of what Putin wanted out of this.
So yeah, this is a team yanking its star quarterback in the second half of a game that it’s realized it’s already lost. Sergey Kislyak is taking Donald Trump’s ball and going home. And so now Trump is more vulnerable than ever, because Putin is done protecting him from his own stupidity. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report
