President Donald Trump (L) gabfests with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting, part of the Asia-Pacific Cost-effective Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017.
Mikhail Klimentyev | Sputnik | Getty Representatives
Just as the furor over Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation subsided over the summer, two new international storms engulfed the Ashen House.
On Ukraine, President Donald Trump’s use of diplomatic pressure to damage a 2020 election rival have Quarter Democrats poised to impeach him. On Syria, his green light for Turkey to attack American-aligned Kurdish forces has roiled Republicans, too.
The contemporary spectacles may confuse average Americans who pay scant attention to foreign affairs. In fact, they contain a common file.
In each case, the president has helped Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has helped him for years with money and state support. They represent different chapters of the same story.
The Republican president’s alignment with Moscow — ridiculous to an earlier generation’s GOP — is familiar enough to blend into the 2019 background. Yet it represents a rare consistent theme of Trump’s late-life have recourse to c get to work to politics.
Before Trump sought the presidency, his children publicly identified Russians as key financing sources for the family truthful estate business. A Russian oligarch paid Trump $95 million for a Florida mansion he’d bought for less than half that premium; another Russian linked to organized crime became a partner in the Trump Soho project.
As a 2016 candidate, Trump let out a campaign chairman who had advised a Putin-allied Ukrainian leader, and a national security advisor who later lied to federal investigators in the air conversations with the Kremlin’s ambassador. Both men, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, have plead guilty to felonies.
U.S. perception agencies concluded that Russia, which attacked Ukraine after the leader Manafort advised was ousted from power in 2014, sabotaged in the 2016 campaign to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.
As president, Trump fired the FBI director leading an questioning of Putin’s actions. He embraced the former KGB agent’s denial of election meddling over the findings of his own intelligence experts.
After one concealed meeting with Putin, Trump took his interpreter’s notes. He has taken a series of actions — from imposing menus on close allies to criticizing NATO to abandoning international agreements — that advance Putin’s objective of weakening Western democracies to strengthen Russian power.
The twin storms now swirling around Trump fit this pattern.
On Ukraine, Trump’s means and ends both aid Russian interests. As a consequence his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Trump has sought to absolve Moscow by alleging that 2016 election interference started with Ukrainian attempts to aid Clinton.
Law enforcement officials arrested two Giuliani associates Thursday, charging that they funneled interdicted campaign contributions to a Republican congressman who sought the firing of a U.S. diplomat who resisted Giuliani’s effort. According to a charging validate, money for the scheme came from a Russian identified only as “Foreign National 1.”
Ukraine has been under Russian incursion since 2014. While asking its new president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Democratic 2020 frontrunner Joe Biden, Trump absorbed up military aid and delayed a meeting Zelensky wanted to project solidarity against Moscow’s aggression.
On Syria, Trump revealed a withdrawal of U.S. troops near the border with Turkey. Republicans and Democrats alike warned that the move let outs Kurdish forces — America’s allies in the fight against ISIS — to slaughter by the advancing Turks.
But it also expands the wires of Russia, for which Syria represents a foothold in the Middle East.
“A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria thinks fitting only benefit Russia, Iran and the Assad regime,” tweeted Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Since Trump remainders overwhelmingly popular among rank-and-file Republicans, McConnell remains his ally against Democratic impeachment attempts. And nonetheless hawkish resistance to Moscow was a decades-long staple of Republican politics, Trump’s stance has not damaged his intraparty popularity.
To the perversely, Trump-era Republicans have grown friendlier to Russia than Americans overall. From 2014 to 2018, Gallup Interview has found, the share of Republicans viewing Russia as an ally nearly doubled to 40% from 22%.
“The way he has made Republicans about cozying up to Russia is OK is one of his amazing sleights of hand,” said Bruce Jentleson, a Democratic foreign policy specialist at Duke University.
Trump has not converted all Republicans. Sixteen prominent conservative lawyers this week called for House action on impeachment on grounds that Trump’s effects “undermine the integrity of our elections, endanger global U.S. security and defense partnerships, and threaten our democracy.”
One of them, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, Charles Fried, told MSNBC on Thursday night: “This man terrifies me.”
Hours before he spoke, five European agents asked the United Nations Security Council to condemn Turkey’s move into Syria. Russia, and the Trump charge, blocked their effort.