ADD TWO AND TWO Trump Wants Putin to Keep Meddling to Get Himself Reelected
Of course Trump says Putin stopped meddling. He wants us to stop paying attention so Putin can meddle him to victory in 2020.
MARGARET CARLSON
07.19.18 5:08 AM ET
"Inexplicable. Head-scratching. Beyond understanding. Baffling.” So goes the commentary about Trump’s press conference in Helsinki.
Really? By now we should all know why Donald Trump sided with Russian president Vladimir Putin against his own country and why, Wednesday, when a reporter asked him if Russia is still targeting U.S. elections, Trump answered “no.”
There he goes again protecting Putin—or not, according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose lies are coming at an ever faster clip. She claimed at her Wednesday press availability that Trump was turning down any more questions, not saying no to a specific one on meddling. Then he took another question.
This is the same Sanders who said last week that chief of staff John Kelly was cringing at breakfast not because the president was delivering a tongue-lashing to the president of NATO but because there were no eggs and bacon, just a lousy pastry. It’s impossible to take her excuses seriously.
Trump is not so complicated that any scratching of heads is needed to get to why he persists in his protection of Putin. It’s the best way to insure Trump’s reelection. Amid the impulses driving Trump, none is more potent than not being a loser and proving to elites they were wrong about him. His constant denial that Russia meddled is not just to to protect his fragile ego from the suggestion he didn’t win fair and square, or to deny collusion, or stop the witch hunt; it’s to exonerate Putin, whose help dragged him over the finish line in the electoral college in 2016 and which he needs again in 2020.
To that end, like a latter day O.J., Trump pretends to search for the real meddler, or meddlers while privately knowing it wasn’t the 400-pound guy in the basement, other countries, or other people. When he’s honest with himself, which we have to hope is more often than he is with us, Trump knows it’s the world leader he most admires who interfered. Still he’s determined to do almost nothing to stop it.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-wants-putin-to-keep-meddling-to-get-himself-reelected?ref=home
