by WorldTribune Staff, July 17, 2018
While #TreasonSummit was trending among The Resistance and Never-Trumpers, among them former CIA director John Brennan, others hailed U.S. President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The mere fact of a U.S. president seeking better relations with Russia should not be controversial,” James S. Robbins, a Department of Defense official in the George W. Bush administration, wrote for USA Today.
His commentary was titled: ‘Donald Trump’s summit message to the Russia collusion witch-hunters: Dream on, losers’.
“President Barack Obama certainly did his best, blaming the George W. Bush administration for souring relations between the two powers. We had Hillary Clinton’s famous 2009 ‘Russian reset,’ complete with a mistranslated red button stolen from a hotel jacuzzi.”
Robbins noted that Obama also “mocked Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in a 2012 debate for his remark that Russia was America’s ‘biggest geopolitical threat,’ saying ‘the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.’ And who can forget Obama’s 2012 hot-mic moment assuring outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that Obama would have ‘more flexibility’ in dealing with Moscow after the election?”
For Democrats “to now invoke the ghost of Joe McCarthy and cry treason at Trump’s efforts to improve relations with Moscow has more than a whiff of hypocrisy,” Robbins wrote. “Besides, do they want relations to get worse? Should the United States purposely freeze out the second (or maybe first) largest nuclear power in the world? Yet if Trump took a hard line with the Kremlin, his critics would say he was trying to conceal his collusion, so it’s a no-win situation.”
Trump “did not become president by doing the easy or expected thing,” Robbins wrote. “His political M.O. is to disrupt the opposition by owning the downside. A summit with Vladimir Putin is the perfect Trumpian way to say to his frantic critics that he couldn’t care less what they think. And it may force some of the more thoughtful ones to begin to consider the possibility that President Trump is right, and the entire Russian collusion narrative has been a lie.”
Radio host Rush Limbaugh responded immediately and forcefully Monday to reporters and pundits who were outraged at Trump’s refusal to blame Putin for wrecking the 2016 election.
“People in the media are nuts if you think that Donald Trump is going to go along with this” Limbaugh said. “He won this race. That’s not who he is. He won this race.”
Trump “won it in a shocking surprise and he did it himself,” Limbaugh added. “He out-worked Hillary Clinton, he worked harder than any candidate in recent memory and he doesn’t want that taken away from him. He doesn’t want Russians getting credit for it. He won this thing and he wants everybody to realize he won it. It wasn’t stolen, he resents this whole line of thinking.”
On Tuesday, Limbaugh said Trump saw through a big media strategy to combine the indictments Friday of 12 Russian by special counsel Robert Mueller with the Monday press conference with Putin in Helsinki to force Trump to publicly acknowledge that his election had been tainted by Russian interference. Instead the president turned that plan upside down by repeatedly raising questions at the press conference about two sets of Democrat servers that were missing: both those that were allegedly hacked by Russians and those under the control of IT aide Imran Awan.
“I really do want to see the (DNC) server,” Trump said. “I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC?”
Sen. Rand Paul said it was not “fair” to criticize Trump for meeting with and speaking good of Putin simply because of the human rights violations under his leadership, reasoning if the United States only met with countries with “perfect constitutional republics,” there would be added conflict because of how few countries like that exist.
“I think the president did a good thing by meeting with Putin and I think it’s a mistake for people to try to turn this into a partisan escapade,” Paul said.
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