Nothing new from Helsinki meeting
Why are people so panicked over Trump’s train wreck of a presser with Vladimir Putin yesterday? To paraphrase that great political philosopher, Yoda, this is the Trump you were looking for.
I watched the whole thing from beginning to end, and what did I see? Trump making stuff up. Trump sucking up to Putin. Trump bragging about his election victory and attacking the Mueller probe. And of course — #FakeNews.
In other words: Donald Trump.
Far from some freaky event, yesterday was just another “Greatest Hits” concert on the Trump tour. Everything he did at the Putin presser, he’d done just days earlier with NATO and with British Prime Minister Theresa May — not to mention dozens of press events before.
Do these words sound familiar? “I think it could very well have been Russia. I think it could well have been other countries. Nobody really knows for sure.”
That was President Trump a year ago.
Today I’m supposed to be shocked?
It’s true that yesterday’s performance was less entertaining than the usual Trumpian fare. He was definitely off his game performancewise. Talking about Syria and Ukraine and the details of energy policy, blah, blah, blah — that’s just not in Trump’s wheelhouse.
The only time he perked up was when he could find an excuse to talk politics. He explained that the Russian investigation “came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election which, frankly, they should have been able to win, because the Electoral College is much more advantageous for Democrats than it is to Republicans.
“We did a great job,” the president said of his own campaign.
Some Trump fans were taken aback by what appeared to be trashing of his own country and praising Putin. Once again, he says this stuff all the time. Trump’s constantly harping about how bad America is at negotiating trade deals, how stupid our foreign policy is, how incompetent the FBI and CIA are, etc. When a president doesn’t trust his own director of national intelligence more than the KGB hack whose regime has poisoned innocent British citizens with a nerve agent — that tells you what Trump really thinks of America.
Why does Donald Trump need to “Make America Great … Again?” Because he thinks it stinks right now.
I spoke to a Trump fan yesterday who was genuinely bewildered by Trump’s buffoonery. “I’ve never seen him this bad before,” he told me. “Who is this guy?”
On Fox News yesterday, the loyal troop of Trump water carriers was just as shaken. “Putin Eats Trump’s Lunch In Helsinki” was the FoxNews. com headline on a piece by Trump apologist Doug Schoen. Brit Hume, who has bent over backwards to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, called his performance “vague and rambling. Lame response, to say the least.”
What we saw yesterday was more of what we’ve seen for 18 months: Trump can’t move on. Like his nemesis Hillary Clinton, he can’t put 2016 in the rear-view mirror and focus on winning in the future.
Instead, as Fox’s Abby Huntsman (daughter of our ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman) put it: “No negotiation is worth throwing your own people and country under the bus.”
Maybe you never noticed before, Abby, but Donald Trump has a very, very big bus.