OPINION | Trump’s bromance with Putin and Epstein
FILE – First lady Melania Trump, left, watches as President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin welcome each other at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, July 16, 2018, prior to Trump’s and Putin’s one-on-one meeting. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Going into the summit which was really a bromance photo-op, the word was Donald Trump needed something to keep his real fear from making headlines.
His “real fear?” The uttering of the name Jeffrey Epstein, the one-time Trump best friend and infamous deceased pedophile. He’s the one uniting Republicans and Democrats against Trump.
But going into the Putin meetup, the polling was problematic for Trump.
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Forty-six percent of Republicans and Independents now say the US doesn’t help Ukraine enough.
It’s a total flip from February when they said Ukraine got too much aid and support.
What’s more, 51 percent of Republicans say the US should give more arms to Ukraine. It was just 30 percent in February.
That’s when the UN voted on a resolution to end the war in Ukraine. And guess what happened. Russia, China, North Korea, Hungary, all the strongman countries voted NO.
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And so did the country with the wanna-be dictator, the US.
That’s right. The leader of the free world, voted with autocratic nations.
The public opinion is different now.
But Trump is back on board with Putin.
Friday’s meeting was all Putin, with Trump saying sweet nothings, and the Russian president manipulating Trump.
Trump had gone in wanting a ceasefire, but leaves the meeting with Putin wanting to end the war now, but essentially on his terms.
That’s for Russia keeping more of Ukraine and giving nothing back.
It is a strange world if the motivation for Trump is to win a Nobel Peace Prize, because judging from that meeting, the one who is more eager to end the war – granted on his own despicable terms – is Putin.
And just imagine that headline. Putin the war criminal as the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize?
After Friday, Trump seems clueless. Polls say support Ukraine, but he can’t because he believes in Putin.
Yet polls on Putin going into the meeting were overwhelmingly negative in US polling.
No one likes Putin except Trump.
Possibly because Trump isn’t acting like a president. He’s thinking about business deals with Putin and this is the problem when you have a president who is more into self-serving dealmaking than in being the leader of the US.
What’s more, Putin, is so unpopular because he started the war that has resulted in nearly a million deaths, not to mention the taking of children from Ukraine.
This is far more criminal than anything Epstein did.
And yet does it surprise you whom the president likes to coddle up to?
Look who your president is in bed with.
It’s creepy and disgusting to see Trump act so sycophantically to Putin.
When I talked to Daniel Phil Gonzales, Filipino American studies professor emeritus at San Francisco State University, he agreed. “It was embarrassing, only because to me Trump loved it,” he said.
It was a mutual lick-fest, with reports indicating that everything was one-sided toward Putin.
Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelenskyy will head to the White House on Monday, and it’s likely to be a repeat of that dressing down last February when Trump and JD Vance offered no red carpet welcome to Zelenskyy. Not like they did for Putin this week.
The only hope?
Gonzales says it’s up to NATO and the allies to pump money and weapons to defend freedom and democracy. The US under Trump doesn’t seem like it’s ready to do it.
All this because Trump really doesn’t like democracy. He’ll free the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and jail innocent undocumented people.
He’ll prop up a war criminal like Putin, and give the freedom fighter Zelenskyy short-shrift.
“He’s stuck,” said Gonzales of Zelenskyy. “He could only take one position, and that’s to answer to his people.”
But it’s up to NATO and the allies to step up too. “Putin has no reason to compromise on anything right now.”
The war criminal played the president in Alaska, just as he did in Helsinki in 2018. That’s when despite all the intel from his own spies, Trump took the word of Putin who said he had nothing to do with interfering with US elections.
That’s the ongoing danger of Trump as leader of the free world.
He trusts dictators, war criminals and pedophiles way too much for democracy’s sake.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, news analyst and comic stage performer. He writes for the Inquirer.net’s US Channel. He has written a weekly “Amok” column on Asian American issues for more than 30 years. Find him on YouTube, patreon and substack. See him live at the Edmonton Fringe Aug. 15-24.
