Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) noticed this odd remark from the Kremlin’s spokesman in 2016, at the time he made it. It was a prescient catch, indeed. (Can’t recommend her work enough – a powerful, clear-sighted assessment of authoritarianism, well-suited to #TrumpRussia, and international relations beyond.)
I tweeted this on July 26, 2016. Found it odd that Kremlin spokesman referred inquiries about hacks to Donald Trump Jr. Now we know why! https://t.co/5D5Ttwl3AP
Having a prior phone conversation with the person who arranged the meeting, of course, makes it even less likely that Trump fils was ignorant of the subject matter.
One could modify that list only slightly, and thereby describe Trump’s present influence in America:
(1) those who have served the Trump as operatives and surrogates to advance his agenda in opposition to America liberty and sovereignty, (2) those sympathetic to Trumpism (including white nationalists, anti-Muslim bigots, and theologically-confused & intellectually-stunted Americans who ludicrously think that Trump’s a moral exemplar), (3) those who wilfully refuse to see the damage Trump has done, (4) those who for years have maintained the low standards that have allowed Trump-style lies and misconduct to flourish (including every glad-handing Babbitt in every town in America), and (5) those of us who should have seen more clearly, and dealt with the rest more assertively & decisively, all these years gone by.
Most people, facing a conflict not of their wishes, would yet prefer to fight on only one front. America has not had that luxury in prior conflicts, and those of us in opposition do not have that luxury now. Some might have hoped to fight only nationally, and others to do so only locally. However one might apportion one’s time, there is a need to engage on both fronts.
Those supporting Trumpism declared boldly (and falsely) in 2016 that theirs was an existential struggle. I don’t believe for a moment that their situation was such; I’ve no doubt that they’ve now pushed those in opposition into such a conflict. What they unreasonably feared for themselves they’ve now unjustly inflicted on others.
One of the interesting – but hard to answer – questions about local news is the composition of its readership. Of local news publications, this question implicates professional publications like the Daily Union and Gazette (and even a longtime politician’s website like the Banner).
One could guess – but only guess – that local readership of these publications is probably similar to that of Fox News. Nationally, newspaper readership skews to older Americans: half of newspaper readers in 2015 were over 65 years old. For Fox News, it’s a similar, if even older, demographic: half of Fox News viewers in 2015 were over 68. These are nationwide, rather than local, readership and viewership data.
Although Gazette, Daily Union, and Banner likely skew old, that doesn’t mean the same older people are consuming both Fox and these print media.
Still, it’s probably not a bad assumption. I’d guess that there’s a significant overlap between the readership of these publications and viewership of Fox. In some cases this is because the respective publishers lean the way Fox does; more significantly, the publications in this group (surely the professional ones) are probably financially beholden to a readership that looks to Fox for political guidance. An overt break would doom them with skittish advertisers. (More broadly, a lifetime of glad-handing and ingratiation now likely depends on toeing a none-too-sharp party line.)
It must be a difficult atmosphere environment in which to work. The best decision one could make would be to chart one’s own course, avoiding having to fret over tension between a normal standard and one no better than Fox delivers.
One measures the strength of a position by whether one would abandon it for another. Sometimes a good decision simply requires that one turn away from others’ worse ones. I’ve felt from the beginning, and feel incrementally more so each day, that an independent course has been the right one.
We might have lived in easier times, when an independent course would count for less; these are not those easier times. Acquiescence seemed a bad choice five or ten years ago; it’s far worse than that now.
Thursday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 02m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission will hold a special meeting at 6 PM this evening.
On this day in 1787, the Continental Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance, providing “for the administration of the territories and set rules for admission as a state. The Northwest territory included land west of Pennsylvania and Northwest of the Ohio River, which encompassed present day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, parts of Minnesota and of course Wisconsin.” On this day in 1936, Wisconsin records its hottest temperature, of 114 degrees, in the Wisconsin Dells.
The media is, in large part, missing the point when it comes to the news about Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Vesilnitskaya and should be steering instead to raising the right questions. It is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which a private citizen in Russia has access to derogatory information on a U.S. presidential candidate. The act of offering such information was likely, at minimum, a trial balloon, and at best (from Moscow’s perspective), a chance to pass certain information from an agent of the Russian government to the Trump campaign through the candidate’s campaign manager and son, thereby also implicating Donald J. Trump himself. This raises the most important questions: what did she offer in that meeting? How did Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort respond?
Vesilnitskaya may have had her own agenda in requesting a meeting with Trump. That part could be legitimate. But Russian intelligence practice is to co-opt such a person by arming them with secret intelligence information and tasking them to pass it to Trump’s people and get their reaction. Did Trump’s associates like it? Do they want more? Did they report it to U.S. authorities? The key point is that essentially no Russian citizen or lawyer has compromising material on Hillary Clinton which has not been supplied to them from Russian intelligence. The simple assertion that she had such information is tantamount to declaring that Vesilnitskaya was acting as agent of Russian government in this particular role. Couple that with the specific text of the email messages (PDF full text) sent to Donald Trump Jr. to set up the meeting which described the material as coming from the Russian government. All the alarm bells should have been going off in Trump Tower when they received an email offering to provide “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and it’s government’s support for Mr. Trump.” A later email refers to the “Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.” Donald Trump Jr.’s response: he would include Manafort and Kushner in the meeting.
It comes down a simple question: Can Trump do anything wrong? By laying out what it would consider wrongdoing, National Review has answered yes. It has set out a standard for Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, to meet. By shifting their argument to “everyone does it,” Hannity and Gingrich have essentially answered no, nothing Trump could have done would qualify as wrongdoing. It is, after all, always possible to find examples of other people doing bad things. Remember what Trump said in December 2015 when Joe Scarborough pushed him about Putin’s murder of journalists: “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”
It’s now easier to predict which conservatives will defend Trump to the end and which conservatives will not. The argument between them will help determine whether his presidency survives.
Journalists were barred from the closed-door farewell reception hosted by the US-Russia Business Council. Several attendees, though, described what outsiders might consider a strangely serene and low-key send-off, at which business people and policy wonks mingled, snacked, and remembered the softer side of a man accused of overseeing Russian espionage efforts over nine years as Moscow’s man in D.C. There was little reference, they said, to the swirling collusion controversy that has left relations between the countries at their worst since the Cold War, not to mention the big news of the day about Donald Trump Jr….
Mother Jones caught Kislyak as he exited the St. Regis, accompanied by a few well-wishers but no evident security. Asked to assess his tenure, the ambassador called it “interesting.”
“It could have been more interesting,” he added when pressed on whether he regretted the recent downturn in relations.
It was not clear exactly what he meant. But Kislyak left the confusion hanging, climbed in the idlingcar, and departed.
Today, all seventeen Democratic members of the House Committee on the Judiciary wrote to Attorney General Jeff Sessions to request information about his decision to abruptly settle United States v. Prevezon Holdings Ltd, a money laundering case that the Department of Justice (DOJ) abruptly settled that involved Russia sanctions, New York real estate holdings, and the lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr.
In their letter, the Members wrote, “Last summer, Donald Trump, Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected attorney in an attempt to obtain information “that would incriminate Hillary.” Earlier this year, on May 12, 2017, the Department of Justice made an abrupt decision to settle a money laundering case being handled by that same attorney in the Southern District of New York.[1] We write with some concern that the two events may be connected—and that the Department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts.”
In addition to the letter, House Judiciary Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr., issued the following statement:
“The connections here are too substantial to ignore. Why was a Russian money-laundering case involving more than $230 million dismissed without explanation? Why was a central figure in that case chosen to approach the Trump campaign about assistance from the Russian government? Was the firing of Preet Bharara in any way related to his office’s prosecution of these crimes? Wittingly or unwittingly, was the Department of Justice involved?
“Even if these facts are mere coincidence—and there is reason to be doubtful that they are mere coincidence—they merit immediate explanation by the Attorney General and immediate investigation by the House Judiciary Committee.”
Background: The Prevezon case relates to a massive tax-theft and money laundering scheme uncovered in 2007 by Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. His 2012 death in Russian custody led to the passage of the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which enabled President Obama to sanction the Russian officials thought responsible for such human rights abuses.
A 2013 complaint filed in federal court alleged that Prevezon helped to launder more than $230 million stolen from the Russian treasury, largely through high-end real estate in Manhattan. One of Prevezon’s attorneys was Natalia Veselnitskaya—a lawyer known for lobbying against the Magnitsky Act, and the “Russian government attorney” who met with Donald Trump, Jr. and others to discuss “information and official documents that would incriminate Hillary” on June 9, 2016. Even Donald Trump Jr.’s alternative explanations for this meeting—he described the discussion, at one point, as “primarily about adoption”—appear to turn on Ms. Veselnitkaya’s efforts to protect her client and undo U.S. sanctions on Russian officials.
On May 12, 2017—just two days before the Prevezon trial was set to begin—the Department of Justice settled the case for less than $6 million and no admission of guilt. Ms. Veselnitskaya told one Russian news outlet that the penalty was so light that it seemed “almost an apology from the government.”
Full text of the letter to Attorney General Sessions can be found here.
(I’m not a Democrat, but am more than willing to support any effort to receive more information on Putin-affiliated Russian nationals making favorable deals over criminal conduct.)
Martha McSally, a member of Congress from Arizona (R-02), chose to wear a sleeveless dress and open-toed shoes while speaking on the House floor. It’s not, to be sure, the most consequential act of these times, but the rules against such attire are unnecessarily restrictive. She’s dressed ordinarily for an American woman in the summer, and, indeed, millions of women in all sorts of professions dress similarly. Congressional prohibitions on this style of dress are simultaneously irritating and ridiculous.
Figures like Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer, cogs in the White House machinery who today seamlessly defend Trump and his lies, did not come to Trump World from the fever swamps of Breitbart News. They are from the heart of the GOP apparatus, the Republican National Committee, where only yesterday — in the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat — they were preaching moderation and inclusiveness.
Employing their skills to rationalize Trump’s fabrications, his misogyny, his debasement of discourse and language, and his strange admiration for and acquiescence to Vladimir Putin, these apparatchiks have compromised themselves even more than Trump’s band of true believers. There is no going back. The latter — figures like Jeffrey Lord, Kayleigh McEnany,and Katrina Pierson — have come to resemble a cult of unswerving loyalty to Trump and the Trump line….
As the Russian collusion story enters a new and perhaps decisive phase, it would not be surprising to see these intellectuals [Bennett, Gelernter, Kimball], along with the political operatives and politicians, stick with Trump to the bitter end. Having wandered into the muck, they are loath to admit how badly they’ve soiled themselves, let alone turn back. Their dilemma is quite similar to the one their hero now faces as the lies unravel and the truth comes to light. They have no good choices. The rest of us can take satisfaction that the ship of fools has run aground.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see thunderstorms with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 04m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1995, a deadly heat wave strikes the Midwest: “From July 12-15, 1995, the Midwest was subjected to a deadly outbreak of hot and humid weather responsible for 141 deaths in Wisconsin. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, this was the “greatest single event of weather-related deaths in Wisconsin history.” Most of the fatalities happened in the urban southeast counties of the state, and at one point several Milwaukee-area hospitals were unable to admit more patients.
Milwaukee Temperatures (from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel): July 12: Hi=91, Lo=65 July 13: Hi=103*, Lo=78 July 14: Hi=102, Lo=84 July 15: Hi=92, Lo=69 July 16: Hi=88, Lo=68 *Some communities reported highs as high as 108. Heat Index values were 120-130 degrees.”
The Trump campaign in 2016 was signaling to Russia that it would be happy to have the Putin regime’s help. President Trump, as a candidate, famously called for Russia’s assistance. Later, when pressed, he repeatedly refused to clearly acknowledge its interference or condemn it.
Now it appears that Trump campaign was not simply hinting that it would welcome this help. The Wall Street Journal very recently, and now the New York Times, have reported active Trump campaign or campaign supporter contacts with Russian agents or intermediaries toward the goal of obtaining negative information about Hillary Clinton. And, for the first time, someone named Trump–Donald, Jr.–has publicly confirmed that the campaign communicated directly with a Russia foreign national connected with the Putin regime in the bid for material damaging to the former Secretary of State.
In previous pieces, I have discussed the ground of legal liability based on “substantial assistance” to, or “aiding and abetting,” a foreign national’s providing a “thing of value” to influence an election. To this date the evidence has been largely on the public record, in “plain sight,” and it included Mr. Trump’s own comments. The recently published reports do not replace this theory; they supplement it, or round it out, by corroborating that what the campaign was pursuing through private channels were the same goals–help from the Russians—that were strongly indicated by the candidate’s words and related public behavior.
Perhaps the biggest conceit of Donald Sr.’s rationale for seeking the presidency was his competence as a manager. Many voters assumed that because he is rich and once hosted a successful reality-television show, Trump could effectively lead an organization. The more details that emerge about how his campaign really operated behind the scenes — and how paralyzed his White House is now — the clearer it becomes that the president is in way over his head….
Perhaps Donald Trump knew that all this was going on, which would make his statement at the press conference last spring a particularly shameless lie, even by his standards. Only a fool would ever again trust a politician who they caught in a lie like that.
Then again, maybe Trump was oblivious to the meeting that took place in Trump Tower. But if it’s the latter, that means that Trump was so ignorant about what happened inside his own campaign that he didn’t even know about a meeting his own son scheduled for the purpose of colluding with the Russian government, even though both his campaign manager and his son-in-law were also in attendance. That would mean his closest advisers were actively keeping him in the dark.
Both possibilities, though, point to the same conclusion: The president cannot be believed. Either Trump’s denials about campaign collusion with Russia cannot be believed because he is a shameless liar; or Trump’s denials about campaign collusion with Russia cannot be believed because he was utterly clueless about at least one major effort to collude, and thus cannot credibly attest that there were not other efforts to which he wasn’t privy.
So how did this relatively inexperienced team exceed expectations to this extent over the first half? Here are 10 reasons for the Brewers’ surprise showing:
1. CORNERING THE MARKET
Seeking to balance what had been a predominantly right-handed lineup in 2016, the Brewers acquired two left-handed hitters with pop to man their infield corners. First baseman Eric Thames was signed to a three-year deal after tearing up the Korean Baseball Organization for three seasons and third baseman Travis Shaw was part of a package of players acquired from Boston in a trade for reliever Tyler Thornburg.
It is safe to say that both Thames and Shaw have exceeded expectations. Thames was the talk of the baseball world in April when he set a club record with 11 home runs and posted a 1.276 OPS. He has cooled off considerably since but still made it to the break with 23 home runs and a .936 OPS. Shaw was the steadiest offensive player on the club, blasting 19 home runs – three more than he had in 145 games with Boston last season – and driving in 65 runs to go with a .937 OPS.
“They have given us the balance we were seeking in our lineup,” manager Craig Counsell said. “I put Travis in the cleanup spot and he has been there every day. Consistency is the word to use when describing his play this season [list continues]….
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with an even chance of afternoon showers. Sunrise is 5:27 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 05m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
At 6:30 PM, there will be a Common Council & City Management Strategic Planning Meeting.
On this day in 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounds former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a pistol duel near Weehawken, N.J. On this day in 1839, the first patent is issued to a Wisconsin resident: “Ebenezar G. Whiting of Racine was issued patent #1232 for his improved plow, the first patent issued to someone from Wisconsin. Whiting’s improvements consisted of making the mold-board straight and flat which, when united in the center with the curvilinear part of the mold-board, would require less power to drag through the dirt.”
FLAG: Schiff tells @maddow when Don Jr. took that meeting, the Russians had *already* hacked into Democratic servers, but hadn’t dumped docs pic.twitter.com/KI56VpMmZa
Trump’s surrogates (who are, effectually, fellow travelers of Russian electoral interference) don’t fare well when confronted by reasonable, loyal Americans (as one sees here in an exhange between Max Boot and Trump supporter Mike Schields):
Outraged over the NYT report about Trump Jr’s alleged collusion w a Russian lawyer, conservative @MaxBoot obliterates Trump-fan Mike Shields pic.twitter.com/iPWuepKBGs
Tens of millions of people show up to vote in the midterm elections to discover their names are no longer on the voter rolls. Thousands of voting machines malfunction and do not properly record votes. Tallies are distorted and inaccurate numbers are sent from counties to states. TV networks call races for the wrong candidates. Recounts begin. Lawsuits are filed.
That’s the nightmare scenario for next year’s elections, and national security and cybersecurity experts warn it’s a very real possibility unless something is done about the country’s outdated election infrastructure — and fast. The hyper-partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill, however, appears to have frozen any effort to shore up defenses ahead of the midterms, with Republicans wary of giving more attention to the ongoing Russia probes and suspicious that Democrats are only using the issue to attack the president.
Collusion is usually defined as a secret agreement to do something improper. In the criminal-law world, we call that conspiracy. If unlawful collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals did take place, criminal conspiracy would be one of the most likely charges….
Conspiracies, by their nature, take place in secret. To break through that secrecy, prosecutors often rely on circumstantial evidence. The classic trial lawyer’s metaphor is that each such piece of evidence is a brick. No single event standing alone may prove the case. But when assembled together, those individual bricks may build a wall — a big, beautiful wall — that excludes any reasonable doubt about what happened.
That’s why this latest news is a big deal. The meeting helps establish a few critical facts. The first is simply that contacts between Russians and campaign officials did take place. If you are seeking to prove a criminal partnership, evidence that the alleged partners had private meetings establishes the opportunity to reach an agreement.
This Tuesday, July 11th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Beauty and the Beast @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.
Beauty and the Beast (2017) is a live-action fairy tale about a monstrous-looking prince and a young woman who fall in love.
Bill Condon directs the two hour, nine-minute film, starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, and Kevin Kline. Beauty and the Beast received two MTV Movie + TV Awards, for Best Movie and Best Actor in a Movie (Emma Watson). Beauty and the Beast carries a PG rating from the MPAA.
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thunderstorms and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 06m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
The question is this: Can the system be strengthened against cyberattacks in time for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race? The answer, encouragingly, is that there are concrete steps state and local governments can take right now to improve the security and integrity of their elections. A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice identifies two critical pieces of election infrastructure — aging voting machines and voter registration databases relying on outdated software — that present appealing targets for hackers and yet can be shored up at a reasonable cost.
Last year, Russian hackers tried to break into voter databases in at least 39 states, aiming to alter or delete voter data, and also attempted to take over the computers of more than 100 local election officials before Election Day. There is no evidence that they infiltrated voting machines, but they have succeeded in doing so in other countries, and it’s only a matter of time before they figure it out here. R. James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, wrote in an introduction to the Brennan Center report, “I am confident the Russians will be back, and that they will take what they have learned last year to attempt to inflict even more damage in future elections.”
The report identifies three immediate steps states and localities can take to counter the threat [lists of three steps follows]….
Bush 43 WH ethics lawyer on NYT story/Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner meeting with Russian lawyer: “This borders on treason” via @MSNBCpic.twitter.com/Ceu5xLYgnB
Republican-backed laws requiring a photo ID to cast a ballot have attracted attention in recent years for impedingthe ability of minority, poor, and elderly people to vote. But increasingly, the focus of the voting rights battle is over who gets to be on the list of registered voters. Democrats have successfully pushed for automatic voter registration in eight states and the District of Columbia, while Republicans have begun putting up roadblocks to registration. In Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican with a national reputation for crafting anti-immigrant laws and pushing the myth of widespread voter fraud, is locked in a legal battle with the ACLU over his decision to require Kansans to show a birth certificate or passport in order to register to vote. (Kobach and Adams are working together on a case to determine whether states can require people to show proof of citizenship in order to register.) Kobach was recently appointed vice chair of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, a perch from which he may recommend more stringent registration requirements nationwide.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 08m 13s of daytime. The moon is full today. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1755, Frenchman Charles de Langlade leads an ambush: “a group of Wisconsin Native Americans (including Ottawa and Ojibway) against the British General Braddock during the French and Indian War. Langlade, acting as “commander” of the Northwestern Indians, ambushed the British troops. The battle is depicted in the oil painting by Edward W. Deming which hangs on the 4th floor of the Wisconsin Historical Society. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes, 1939; pg 25]”
Four months before its July 4 missile test, North Korea offered the world a rare technical preview of its latest missile engine, one said to be capable of lobbing nuclear warheads at U.S. cities. A video on state-run TV depicted a machine with thickets of tubes and vents, and a shape that struck some U.S. experts as familiar — in a distinctly Soviet way.
“It shocked me,” said Michael Elleman, one weapons expert who noticed jarring similarities between the engine tested by North Korea in March and one he frequently encountered in Russia at the end of the Cold War. “It seemed to come out of nowhere.”
After intensive study, Elleman, a former consultant at the Pentagon, and other specialists would report that they had detected multiple design features in the new North Korean missile engine that echo those of a 1960s-era Soviet workhorse called the RD-250.
Two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.
The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.
While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.
(Hallie Jackson reports that “spox for POTUS outside legal team casts mtg as part of oppo effort. Source close to team calls it ‘poss. setup by Russian operatives’.” Bill Kristol correctly observes that Trump’s own private lawyers see the significance of this revelation, and that the “legal team must be worried. If you’re suggesting the meeting is a setup, you’re acknowledging the meeting is on its face problematic.”)
In every respect, Putin now faces a US leadership feebler than at any time in the 17 years he has ruled Russia – or for many decades, for that matter. It’s not just that both the president and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, are foreign policy novices. Or that the State Department is depleted, with hundreds of key posts unfilled. The problem goes much deeper….
Even if Trump had more skill and was surrounded by more able people, he’d still be in a shaky position. His administration is as distracted as he is by the cloud that hangs over them permanently: the gathering investigation into the Russia affair. From Hamburg, Trump tweeted the laughable claim that: “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the [Democratic National Committee] server to the FBI and the CIA”, proof that he obsesses over the details of that saga even when he is meant to be engaged in high diplomacy.
It often used to be said that in the US, foreign policy is domestic policy. That maxim referred to the way US diaspora communities could shape decisions on the countries they had left behind. In the age of Trump, it has new meaning. Thanks to his domestic situation, he can barely move on the world stage. No wonder Putin was smiling in Hamburg. He knows he has succeeded in his chief objective: he has made America weak again.
