No more questions to Putin; they’re all for Trump now
Maureen Dowd
I had dinner with Vladimir Putin once. He made me lose my appetite.
The then-fledgling president of Russia was polite and smiling at first with me and the other journalists present at the 21 Club.
But then Katie Couric asked about his bloodless behavior in the wake of the Kursk submarine disaster in the summer of 2000, when the boat sank and all 118 on board were killed. She pressed him on why he didn’t come back from vacation when all those sailors were suffering and dying in the submarine.
His face completely changed, almost as if he had ripped off a “Mission Impossible” mask. Suddenly, he stared coldly at Katie, every inch the KGB agent. He looked like Richard Widmark playing a psychotic thug in a ’50s film noir.
Just beneath the surface of the leader was a killer.
And thanks to the admonitions of his father, Donald Trump admires killers.
Trump hugging Putin even as Putin stabs at our democracy is an incomprehensible mystery.
Flummoxed and craven Republicans scramble to go along with a president who has turned the traditional heroes and villains of the GOP topsy-turvy, berating our European allies, NATO, the NFL, the FBI and the CIA, and canoodling with the mendacious and scheming Russians.
On the eve of the Helsinki summit, it was still befuddling and alarming to watch him kowtow to Putin.
Maybe he is the Manchurian candidate, in need of a hypnotic tuneup. Perhaps it’s an Oedipal thing, that Putin reminds Trump of his authoritarian father. Possibly it’s blackmail or his fear of people suspecting Russia saved his businesses.
Or maybe it is, as it so often is with Trump, the most puerile answer: He is affronted by the suggestion that he won his election illegitimately. This is, after all, a man who is still obsessing on the size of his inauguration crowd.
So rather than accept the reality, laid out by his own Justice Department, that we are in a cyberwar with Russia, the president did what he does best.
The “Apricot Toddler,” as he was dubbed in Britain, pounds the high chair, makes messes, pushes buttons and stage-manages cliffhangers.
Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, gave an interestingly timed press conference Friday that overshadowed Trump’s moment with the queen. It was as if they were sending a message to Trump before his Putin meeting Monday that “We’ve got our eye on you.”
Rosenstein said he briefed the president before Friday’s indictment of the 12 Russian agents — officers who wouldn’t have made a move without Putin’s blessing. So if Trump got through his whole briefing, he would have been aware of this: that on the same day in July 2016 that he urged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “30,000 emails,” Russian hackers tried for the first time to break into her servers.
Even so, he was his usual blithe self about Russia in the news conference with Theresa
May. He knocked Robert Mueller’s “rigged witch hunt” and said that he would “firmly” ask Putin whether Russia meddled in our election, but that he doubted there would be any “Perry Mason” moment.”
But there is no question for Putin any more. The question now is for Trump: What are you going to do about the Russian attack on America?