Trump’s crime – having fun at his job
President Trump must be impeached.
He is having too good of a time as president, which means he is doing, or must have done, something impeachable. His joy over the July 4 celebration is an example of that.
After all, it must be a crime if Trump can get a laugh out of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, the man progressives love to hate, except when Barack Obama was cuddling up to him.
(“Tell Vlad, this is my last election. After my election I will have more flexibility,” Obama told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on a hot mic in Seoul in 2012.)
Presidents are not supposed to be happy. Or if they are, they are not supposed to show it.
Since they have the weight of the world on their shoulders, they are supposed to look miserable, like Obama used to look, or the way the score of Democrats running for president look.
Did you ever come across an unhappier group of people than the 20-plus Democrats who want to be president?
The only time any of them smiled — or smirked — during the two televised debates was when Sen. Kamala Harris, 54, in a clear case of elder abuse, took down Joe Biden, 76, for something the former vice president said about busing 40 years ago.
No wonder Biden did not smile. And the last time Bernie Sanders, the old Bolshevik, cracked a smile was during his honeymoon in the Soviet Union when, swilling vodka with his Bolshy buddies, they sang Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is My Land.”
Even former President Jimmy Carter, 94, who was president before most people were born, got into the act. Carter said Trump “was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
The implication is that it is now an impeachable offense for a president to be on talking terms with an adversary who wants to clean your clock.
Which led The New York Sun to dredge up a photo of President Carter kissing Soviet Union leader Leonid Brezhnev during a Vienna summit in 1979.
Carter is lucky. If Obama had not come along, he would be ranked the worst president in U.S. history. Now he is only the second worst.
While Putin is no prize — he is responsible for the murders of opponents and journalists — Brezhnev was worse. Brezhnev was so drunk most of the time that he did not know who he killed or why.
And what would the World War II outcome had been if President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not collude with Joseph Stalin, the ruthless Russian dictator who murdered 10 million of his own people even before the war began?
“The death of one man is a tragedy,” Stalin said. “The death of millions is a statistic.”
Yet together, Roosevelt and Stalin defeated Hitler and Nazi Germany and made the world — at least our part of it — safe for democracy.
I am not suggesting that they move in together, but it is far better for Trump and Putin to be talking than fighting. Trump as a businessman knows that you need to talk to people, get to know them and build a rapport, if you are to do business with them. And he has a good time doing it.
This was clear with his historic and unprecedented meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at Korea’s 38th Parallel on the final day of his trip. Critics who say nothing came of the meeting miss the whole point. It was the meeting itself that was the point. They are building a relationship that eventually could lead to disarming North Korea of nuclear weapons.
The progressive mainstream media was thrown in a dither about the Kim meeting, as well as with Trump joking with Putin about Russian meddling in U.S. elections at the G20 Summit.
Asked if he would tell Putin not to interfere in U.S. elections, Trump grinned, turned to Putin and jokingly said, “Don’t meddle in the election.” Putin smiled, and then Trump repeated, “Don’t meddle in the election.”
Later at a meeting, Trump urged the Russian leader to clear the room of reporters. “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it?” Trump said. “You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”
“We also have,” Putin responded in English. “It’s the same.”
What isn’t the same is that in Russia reporters do turn up dead.
But Trump doesn’t kill them. He just drives them crazy.