“The war in Ukraine is entirely the fault and responsibility of one man, Vladimir Putin, though of course decades of misjudgments in Western foreign policy set the stage for him,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said Monday night. “Recently, however, former President Donald Trump and his allies have been engaging in quite a bit of revisionist history about this matter,” claiming, among other things, that Putin never would have invaded Ukraine if Trump were still president.
In fact, “even some of Trump’s former advisers wonder if his approach may have empowered the Russian president on the world stage,” Tapper said. (The Week‘s Joel Mathis and Damon Linker wonder about that, too.) Assisting Tapper in his look back at Trump’s history with Putin were journalist Julia Ioffe and also Trump and his former aides. He reached back to the 2016 presidential campaign, with a special reminder of why Trump was impeached the first time.
“Trump and his supporters today note that unlike the administrations of Bush and Obama, Putin never invaded any country during the Trump years, which is true — though Russia did significantly ramp up its military presence in Syria,” Tapper said. “But former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton said there could be a good reason for that,” namely that Trump was planning to withdraw the U.S. from NATO in a second term.
At about the same time as Tapper was revisiting Trump’s relationship with Putin on CNN, Eric Trump was making the case to Fox News host Sean Hannity that Putin, as a former KGB agent, respected Trump and saw his strength.
Unlike Trump’s great relationship with Putin, President Biden has no relationship with him, Eric Trump asserted. He also, inadvertently, alluded to his father’s first impeachment and suggested, bizarrely, that Biden is just sending Ukraine “blankets,” not massive amounts of weapons.
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