The best President Russia’s ever had?
IN ANY other moment of history, with any other president, America’s commander-in-chief denying he was a secret Russian agent would be unthinkable.
But standing on the White House lawn this week, his own government shut down around him, Donald Trump was asked if he was working for the Kremlin.
“Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it’s a disgrace that you even asked that question, because it’s a whole big fat hoax,” Trump boomed in a hoarse voice. “It’s just a hoax.” Trump raised concerns over the weekend when he didn’t directly answer whether he was working for Russia in an interview with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, a personal friend.
He merely said the question of him working for Vladimir Putin was “insulting”.
He had been asked about a New York Times report that law enforcement officials began investigating two years ago whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.
It claimed that after the President fired FBI Director James Comey, the feds began looking at whether he was an intelligence threat.
This suspicion arose naturally after Trump complained about Comey to Russian diplomats, later saying he had the “Russia thing” in mind when he axed the director.
The “thing” that troubled Trump was Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election, which cast a dark shadow on his claim to legitimacy.
In an appropriate, albeit unwanted twist, his destructive decision to fire Comey prompted the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investiagtion now jeopardises Trump even more.
Never in history has an American president been required to answer such serious, credible questions about his loyalties.
But you only need look at Trump’s behaviour since entering the White House to see why.
In the past month alone, he has announced he would pull US troops out of Syria, something the Russians have long called for.
He subsequently said the Soviet Union was right to invade Afghanistan in 1979, repeating Russian revisionist history by claiming it was seeking to quell terrorism.
Last week, his former campaign chief Paul Manafort was found to have shared political polling data in 2016 with an associate linked to Russian intelligence providing the most direct evidence to date that the campaign may have tried to co-ordinate with Moscow.
And even before Mueller’s report, we already know of 97 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia-linked operatives, including at least 28 meetings, all of which the Trump campaign tried to cover up.
All this despite Trump’s boasting he has been “much tougher on Russia” than any other president.
Throughout his time in the Oval Office, the President has repeatedly praised Putin and those leaders aligned with the Russian.
He was even found this week to have gone to extraordinary lengths to try and conceal the contents of his face-to-face meetings with Putin, begging the burning question, why?
On at least one occasion he forcibly took possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructed the linguist not to discuss what had transpired in the meeting with other administration officials.
All his toadying to Putin comes amid attack after attack on the two pillars of the western world: the European Union and NATO.
It seems there is no longer any question whether collusion occurred.
The only questions that remain are: What did the President know? And when did he know it?
Trump labelled the questioning he was working as a Russian agent as “insulting”.
What is far more insulting is that the American people feel they need to ask the most powerful man in the world whether he has become Putin’s puppet.