Donald Trump continues to say things that you would generally expect only a psychopath to say. He also continues to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid insulting one and only one person in the entire world: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s remarks came in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly that was previewed Saturday and is set to be broadcast in full Sunday evening before the Super Bowl. In the clip, Trump repeated his past praise for Putin, saying “it’s better to get along with Russia than not,” which prompted O’Reilly to press him: “But he’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”
“There are a lot of killers,” Trump said. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”
Ah, yes, that most favored of responses when even Bill Freaking O’Reilly points out to you that another nation's strongman government has killed critical journalists, murdered political opponents, curtailed human rights and so forth: So what?
So now other Republicans are embroiled in another round of distancing themselves way-the-heck-away from the man who just implied that assassinating journalists and political opponents was not entirely outside the realm of what America is or ought to be doing itself. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell even poked his head out of his shell after the long, long hibernation caused by Trump's "Muslim ban" to inch away from Trump slightly:
“I don’t think there’s any equivalency between the way that the Russians conduct themselves and the way the United States does,” he said, adding: “I’m not going to critique the president’s every utterance, but [...]
That's a lot of baggage to put on a single but. It's been nearly impossible to find something Trump has said that Mitch would comment on, but it seems yada-yada'ing away political murders will still rate a peep or two. Even Liz Cheney found Trump's statement "deeply troubling" and Liz Cheney was only last week was praising Trump for his dedication to re-opening American torture programs.