DO NOT CONGRATULATE
Oh there’s more. Trump was actually specifically told not to congratulate Putin on the election. By people who do actually know what’s in the security briefings, unlike Trump who refuses to read them or listen to them read by others. But he was elected King and Emperor and God so he can do whatever he wants to.
President Trump did not follow specific warnings from his national security advisers when he congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin Tuesday on his reelection, including a section in his briefing materials in all-capital letters stating “DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” according to officials familiar with the call.
Brief shmief. He used to be a tv star, he don’t need no stinkin brief.
Trump also chose not to heed talking points from aides instructing him to condemn Putin about the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom with a powerful nerve agent, a case that both the British and U.S. governments have blamed on Moscow.
…
“It’s blatantly obvious that he has just an inexplicable level of support for President Putin,” said Julie Smith, a European security expert who served as deputy national security adviser for former vice president Joe Biden. “You keep thinking it will change as he sees his own administration take action — that this never-ending well of support for Putin will some how subside. It’s disheartening at a time when our trans-Atlantic partners really need a boost. Europe is looking to us for leadership on Russia in particular and they’re not getting it.”
Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said Trump’s actions were “a sign he wants a pro-Russia foreign policy,” which conflicts with the harder line from his administration.
…
Trump’s applause of Putin’s victory was in line with other congratulatory calls he has made, including to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for winning a much-disputed referendum that increased his already autocratic powers and to China’s President Xi Jinping for his “extraordinary elevation” after Xi last month engineered the Communist Party’s elimination of presidential term limits.
He likes the tough guys. He wants to be like them.
“…he has just an inexplicable level of support for President Putin,”
Not inexplicable at all if Putin has control of Trump through blackmail, bribes or whatever. He really should have himself registered as a Foreign Agent:
From Wikipedia…
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) is a United States law passed in 1938 requiring that agents representing the interests of foreign powers in a “political or quasi-political capacity” disclose their relationship with the foreign government and information about related activities and finances. The purpose is to facilitate “evaluation by the government and the American people of the statements and activities of such persons.”
And he thinks they like him. He has no idea how much they are almost certainly laughing at their pet puppet.
I wonder if he thinks about it even *that* deeply. Maybe it’s like, someone makes CEO at another big company, it’s automatic that you phone and congratulate them, maybe set up a golf date. Which shows just how out of his element this schmoozing business man is as CEO of the USA.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1856022997749486/?type=3&theater
This whole story is just weird. Whether to congratulate Putin is a diplomatic choice that the President should be making. Not his staff or his brief writers. Their job should be to essentially remind him of details he needs to know in order to carry out the executives policy position… meaning HIS policy position.
The fact that they gave him an all caps instruction not to do something that he apparently wanted to do suggests, to me, that Trump isn’t making executive branch policy decisions. Someone else is guiding his brief writers and those who typically carry out these policies. And Trump is functioning like an idiot child, stomping through someone else’s White House, changing things when he can be bothered to even notice them.
Normally whether to congratulate Putin is a diplomatic choice that the president should be making, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s in thrall to Putin and Russia in some way; he’s stupid; he doesn’t read the briefings or listen to summaries of them; he doesn’t listen to advice; he doesn’t know what he’s doing; he’s greedy and impulsive; he loves authoritarian rulers like Erdoğan and Duterte and Xi; he likes to throw his weight around by doing the opposite of what the adults suggest…I could go on. There’s no point in doing anything normally with Trump, because he’s not normal.
It was a mistake, that’s all. Trump mis-read the brief, made the congratulatory call, then yelled “Now where’s my frigging DONUT?”
Must admit I can somewhat agree. I wouldn’t want to ever be near his stinkin briefs either.
/sorry ’bout that/