The Putin defense: How far will Donald Trump go now to stay in power?
It’s a short distance from Trump saying “I can do anything I want” to “I can be president as long as I want”
Donald Trump never faced even the tiniest chance that two-thirds of the United States Senate would vote to find him guilty in the impeachment trial we're now being told will come to its ignominious end in the middle of next week. You don't need to put on a defense when you already know the outcome of the trial. He could have gone with what you might call the "potted plant defense," sending Jay Sekulow or Pat Cipollone or even one of the lesser lights on his team to essentially sit there by himself and watch the House managers set their hair on fire. He didn't even need to ask for what amounted to a directed verdict of acquittal. He had all the Republican votes he needed right from the start.
Trump didn't bother merely swatting aside the rule of law and the Constitution. No, he dropped all pretense and went full-on authoritarian, tapping no less a figure than Jeffrey Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz to present the Putin Defense: If it's good for Trump, it's good for the country, and that means it can't be illegal.
I guess we always knew it would come to this. How else can you account for Trump's parade of obsequiousness to Vladimir Putin? It goes back to December of 2015, when Trump was running for the Republican nomination. He appeared on "Morning Joe" not long after Putin had praised him as "brilliant" and "talented." Host Joe Scarborough asked him if he still accepted Putin's praise in the face of his violent policies.
"He's running his country, and at least he's a leader," Trump snapped, stunning Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski. "But again, he kills journalists who don't agree with him," Scarborough stammered. "I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe," Trump replied calmly. "There's a lot of stuff going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on and a lot of stupidity and that's the way it is."
Trump heaped praise on Putin during the 2016 campaign, memorably making the "Russia, if you're listening…" request that they do him the favor of looking for Hillary Clinton's emails in return. Remarkably, it got worse after he took office. There was the infamous G20 Summit in Helsinki in 2018, when Trump took Putin's word that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 election, over the findings of his own intelligence agencies. He went on to blame the Mueller probe for the tensions in U.S.-Russia relations at a time when Russia had invaded and seized Crimea and was waging a war for territory in eastern Ukraine. He waited less than a year to threaten Ukraine by withholding military assistance against the Russians unless the leaders in Kyiv corruptly helped with his re-election campaign.
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