MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump himself are quick to decry the supposedly liberal media’s focus on “Russia, Russia, Russia”—an emphasis that was far from misplaced given that Russia-Trump campaign collusion was conclusively proven in 2020 by a bipartisan Senate committee. But their attempts to work the refs have apparently borne little fruit outside our weird American fever swamps.
As often noted here at Daily Kos (and here and here and—you get the idea) the horse-race-huffing U.S. media, the very existence of which relies on the continued good health of liberal democracy, often appear a bit too blasé about the clear and present threat Trump poses to America and the rest of the free world.
Far too many of our citizens still believe an old guy who remains a champion for democracy is somehow just as dangerous, or more so, than a slightly less old guy who loves dictators, tried to overturn U.S. democracy, and thinks one of the gravest issues facing our planet is liberals’ wholesale elimination of U.S. knocker fields. Our current—and hopefully future—allies appear to see what’s happening in our country a lot more clearly than we do.
In a recent panel discussion on the Australian Broadcasting Company’s “Q & A,” former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull offered a stark assessment of America’s slide into autocracy on the oleaginous backside of Daddy Vlad’s best Western friend.
Watch: Turnbull’s take starts at 4:30.
Transcript!
PATRICIA KARVELAS, HOST: “Malcolm Turnbull, if you look at what’s happening in the United States, obviously where this has become such a polarized, partisan issue. Is the West’s support for Ukraine wavering, and what are the dangers of that?”
TURNBULL: “Well, the danger is that Putin will get what he wants. Putin is a ruthless dictator who has invaded Ukraine, and he is seeking to demonstrate that might is right. That’s what he’s seeking to do. He’s trampling on a democracy. It’s an illegal, criminal, brutal invasion. The Ukrainian people have inspired the world with their courage, and the leadership of their president, Zelenskyy, has been an inspiration to all of us, as it has been to Ukrainians. Without the support of the West, they will struggle to defend themselves.
“Regrettably, the Republican Party under Donald Trump, and particularly the right wing of the Republican Party, are very sympathetic to Vladimir Putin. I mean, I have been with Trump and Putin. Trump is in awe of Putin. When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year-old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. ‘My hero.’ It is really creepy. It’s really creepy.”
Of course, we in the States have been steeped in Trump creep for some time now, so it might be helpful to grade this on a curve. For instance, is the way Trump stares at Putin more or less creepy than the way he stares at his daughter, or perhaps an overturned Little Debbie truck? Regardless, his creepy love of Vladimir Putin is degrees of magnitude more concerning than any of his private peccadilloes.
KARVELAS: “And that struck you at the time?”
TURNBULL: “Oh, absolutely. It struck everybody. It was, it was, like you could touch it. It was creep—the creepiness was palpable. ... I’m just telling you what I saw. You saw that in that press conference they did in, I think, in Helsinki. You saw a similar thing. Now the sad thing is that you’ve got the right wing of the Republican Party—you saw this with Tucker Carlson, doing that sycophantic kind of non-interview with Vladimir Putin. I mean, it’s terrifying. It is terrifying. And the scary thing is that countries like Australia or many European countries, uh, we may find ourselves, are we going to find ourselves not dealing just with two autocracies in Russia and China, but what is Trump’s America going to look like? This is a guy leading a party that is no longer committed to democracy as we understand it.”
As we all know, Trump is plenty creepy from a distance, and his love for Putin does appear unconditional. If you were in a bar and a guy stared at you like this, you’d need a prefrontal lobotomy and at least two Silkwood showers before you could risk solid food again.
So knowing that he might be even creepier up close is all kinds of disturbing.
Meanwhile, Trump’s people are naturally trying to muddy the very clear picture that Turnbull and anyone else with eyes connected to their brains can see for themselves: Trump and the GOP are going out of their way to ensure Putin’s attack on Ukraine is an unmitigated success.
Responding to questions from Newsweek about Turnbull’s pointed comments, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt risibly claimed that Putin was too afraid of his toothless, fawning lapdog to have ever tried anything while he was president.
"When President Trump was in the Oval Office, Russia and all of America's adversaries were deterred, because they feared how the United States would respond," Leavitt told Newsweek. "The only people in America who don't see this clear contrast between Biden's ineffective weakness versus Trump's effective ‘peace through strength’ approach are the left-wing stenographers in the mainstream media who write false narratives about Donald Trump for a living."
Really? Putin was afraid of Trump? Is that why he tried to get Trump elected … twice? Did he do that because he thought Trump—who is currently doing all he can to scuttle U.S. aid to Ukraine—would somehow offer more resistance to Putin’s grand European adventures? Somehow, that seems unlikely.
If Trump defeats Biden in November, it will feel a lot like your mom leaving your dad so she can date Charlie Sheen. And we’ll once again be forced to listen to nearly half our neighbors wax rhapsodic about what a great guy our new stepdad is. So at the very least it’s nice to know that people outside our warped bubble can still see what an unreconstructed prick he is—and exactly what kind of dangers he poses.
It’s the kind of warning more world leaders, and more media leading lights, need to shout from the rooftops—before it’s too late.
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Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link.
