I’m reposting this diary from September this year, before Putin’s involvement in our elections had become a fact requiring investigation. People were very skeptical about the subject then—probably less so now. As I responded to some comments at the time, this was an AP story, not a Huffington Post story.
_______________________________________________
On September 11, 2016, the AP published a full article at the Huffington Post about bad reviews of Donald Trump from Vladimir Putin himself. According to the AP, it appears that Donald Trump should extinguish his hopes that Putin “will like” him and “respect” him. The complete HuffPo article is at www.huffingtonpost.com/...
From the article:
The latest joke in our absurd presidential campaign is that Russian President Vladimir Putin sees Donald Trump as a strong leader. This is causing belly-laughs in the Kremlin.
People in Putin’s inner circle say that Putin considers Trump a buffoon, easily manipulated by flattery, without a scintilla of knowledge or depth about the world outside his golf courses. Moreover, Trump’s stated willingness to recognize Putin’s annexation of Crimea, to lift sanctions, not to object to the occupation of an area in Ukraine, to withdraw promises of support for NATO allies in the Baltic, and for NATO as a whole, is the Russian dictator’s dream.
The money quote:
According to Putin insiders, he sees Trump as a weaker, far more ignorant, wholly self-absorbed version of Neville Chamberlain. Easy-pickin’s.
And here’s this, which seems to have anticipated today’s Newsweek piece and Hillary Clinton’s questions for Trump about his foreign business dealings as a national security problem:
Putin also knows Trump cannot resist a good deal, ie, that benefits him personally. If Trump were president, Putin knows he can offer bargain-basement terms on choice property in Moscow and in St Petersberg, for example, for Trump’s company to build hotels in exchange for geopolitical concessions from the U.S. that have no impact on Trump’s wealth.
That is a very plausible scenario. Donald Trump, Jr. has done much of the Trump Organization business in Russia and Russian investments in US projects. The Trump Organization is not public, and these transactions could be done in a way that would leave the country completely in the dark about a president’s financial dealings. And Donald and Donald Jr. are tight as a tic.
It is remarkable that Trump’s Russophilia has been adopted by people who, had they heard the same about Putin and Russia from a conventional Republican a couple of years, would have called him or her a commie.
Here’s the full article from the Huffington Post:
.