Vladimir Putin “ready to cut his losses” on Donald Trump
As of today, Donald Trump has officially and permanently failed his master. Russian President Vladimir Putin went to great and risky lengths to install Trump into the White House, under the premise that he would be a useful puppet. But Putin’s primary goal based on his own financial interests, and thus Trump’s primary mandate, was to get U.S. sanctions on Russia lifted. Now that Trump has failed, a new report says that Putin is ready to cut his losses.
Donald Trump was forced to sign a bill today that took away his ability to ever lift sanctions on Russia, after Congress passed it in nearly unanimous fashion, making it impossible for him to kill it with a veto. This means, in effect, that those sanctions have no chance of ever being lifted, regardless of what Russia might try to do to atone for its hijacking of the 2016 election, until someone other than Trump is President of the United States.
That’s led Simon Shuster of Time Magazine to report that Vladimir Putin is “ready to cut his losses” on Donald Trump (link). Shuster doesn’t spell out whether this means that Putin is simply done with Trump and is ready to let him sink on his own, or whether Putin is planning to finish Trump off by releasing whatever blackmail material he’s been holding on him the entire time. But one other development today suggests that the Russian government is indeed ready to begin kicking Trump while he’s down.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev seized the opportunity to publicly humiliate Donald Trump today, using his official English-language Twitter account to rip Trump for his “weakness” among other insults (link). Medvedev is little more than a mouthpiece for Putin, meaning that Putin is now trying to further weaken Trump by rubbing in how weak he’s become.
