So much for “America First.”By David A. Graham
OCTOBER 11, 2024
Donald Trump’s affection for oppressive and bloodthirsty dictators is by now so familiar that it might go unremarked, and yet also so bizarre that it goes unappreciated or even disbelieved.
Sometimes, though, a vivid reminder surfaces. That was the case this week, when stories from Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, War,became public. In the book, the legendary reporter writes that in 2020, in the depths of the pandemic, Trump prioritized the health of Vladimir Putin over that of Americans, sending the Russian president Abbott COVID-testing machines for his personal use, at a time when the machines were hard to come by and desperately needed. (The Kremlin confirmed the story; Trump’s campaign vaguely deniedit.) Meanwhile, Trump told people in the United States they should just test less. So much for “America First.”
“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin told Trump, according to Woodward.
“I don’t care,” Trump said. “Fine.”
“No, no,” Putin said. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”
U.S. relations with Russia have deteriorated since Trump left office, especially since Russia launched a brutal, grinding invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But the former president has stayed in touch with Putin, according to Woodward, who says an aide told him that “there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021.”
Trump’s public line on the war in Ukraine is that Putin never would have invaded on his watch, because of his strength. Yet evidence keeps piling up that Trump is weak to any Putin overture—that Putin can get Trump to do what he wants, and has done so again and again. It happened when Trump sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies at the horrifying Helsinki summit in 2018, it happened when he declined to bring up election interference during a phone call in 2019, and it happened when Putin got Trump to hush up the transfer of the testing equipment. If Trump is so effective at pressuring Putin, and he remains in touch with him to this day, why isn’t he exerting that influence to pressure Russia to withdraw and end the war?
Putin is hardly alone. Trump’s record shows a consistent pattern of affection for dictators, with them doing little or nothing for America’s benefit in return. Russia’s apparent moves to interfere in the 2016 election by hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and leaking them—right after Trump made a public appeal for just that—is a rare example of reciprocity, though not to the benefit of the nation. Trump was drawn to the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even though Erdoğan blithely defied Trump’s requests to stop an invasion of Syria and purchased Russian weapons over U.S. objections. Trump also can’t say enough good things about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (when he’s not confusing his country with Iran), but failed to achieve nuclear disarmament despite a splashy summit with Kim.
Some people still seem unwilling to believe that Trump admires these dictators, even though he keeps telling us just that. During his first term, his advisers tried to conceal this affection, warning him in writing before a call to Putin after a corrupt election, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” (He did, of course.) When Putin warned Trump not to disclose the sharing of COVID tests, he showed a more acute grasp of domestic political dynamics than the American president. Yet Trump keeps blurting out his love for authoritarians, including one very strange moment during last month’s presidential debate. Kamala Harris charged that “world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”
“Let me just tell you about world leaders,” he replied. “Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men—they call him a strongman. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime minister of Hungary. They said, Why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago, it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said, Because you need Trump back as president.”
Orbán is not widely respected—he’s a pariah or at least an annoyance in most of the world. (Lest there be any doubt that Trump understands who Orbán is, he helpfully noted the Hungarian’s reputation as a strongman.) Orbán’s endorsement is not reassuring—my colleague Franklin Foer in 2019 chronicled some of his damage to Hungary—and the moment suggests how easily Trump can be manipulated by flattery.
Many people also persist in believing that stories about Trump’s collusion with and ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign were a hoax. This seems to be an unfortunate by-product of Special Counsel Robert Mueller not establishing any criminal conspiracy. Yet the evidence of improper relationships with Russia was out in the open long before Mueller completed his report. Not only was it not a hoax then, but Woodward’s reporting shows that Trump’s secretive dealings with the Kremlin continue to this day.
At one time, commentators seemed perplexed and puzzled by Trump’s love of dictators, because it ran so counter to typical American notions about rule of law and reverence for the Constitution and the country’s Founders, to say nothing of the country’s interests.
But no reason remains for feeling confused. Trump attempted to overturn an election he lost; he denies that he lost—though he conclusively did—and he was comfortable with violence being committed in an effort to keep him in power. He has no remorse for this assault on American democracy. He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one of his second term, and though he claims it’s a joke, he’s also raised the idea of suspending the Constitution. If he returns to office, his legal team has persuaded the Supreme Court to grant him immunity for anything that can be plausibly construed as official conduct. Trump is drawn to dictators—he admires their power, their inability to ever lose—and he wants to be one.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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Milley calls Trump ‘a fascist to the core’ in new Woodward book
BY ELLEN MITCHELL – 10/11/24
Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair and retired Gen. Mark Milley has called former President Trump “a total fascist” and believes he is the most dangerous person to the U.S., according to excerpts from the forthcoming Bob Woodward book.
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley told Woodward for the book “War,” which was previewed by The Guardian. “A fascist to the core.”
Milley, who was chair under Trump and President Biden, also fears he would be court-martialed should Trump win the presidency next month because the commander in chief has power over retired commissioned officers and can recall them to active duty and court-martial them.
Such a situation is not out of the realm of possibility because Trump has often voiced his desire to take revenge on those who have spoken out against him.
“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley warned former colleagues, according to Woodward. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”
Woodward cites Steve Bannon, a former senior Trump adviser, who earlier this year gave a list of people he believes Trump should go after if he is elected to a second term, including Milley, former FBI directors Andrew McCabe and James Comey, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former Attorney General Bill Barr.
“We’re gonna hold him accountable,” Bannon says of Milley in the book.
Bannon is in jail for contempt of Congress.
Trump has previously sought to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who have criticized him. In a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump’s second confirmed secretary of Defense, the then-president “yelled” and “shouted” about two former military officials, William McRaven and Stanley McChrystal, Woodward writes.
McRaven, a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, had written a piece for the Washington Post about Trump, saying “there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”
And McChrystal, a retired special forces general whose men killed al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in 2006, made comments on CNN calling Trump “immoral” and “dishonest.”
Trump called Milley and Esper to the White House and pushed the two to take care of the retired officials, but they pressed him not to seek to punish McRaven and McChrystal.
“The president didn’t want to hear it,” so Milley promised Trump he would “‘take care of this,’” according to Woodward.
Milley then called McRaven and McChrystal and warned them to “pull it back” and “step off the public stage.”
Woodward also wrote of Milley receiving “a non-stop barrage of death threats” since he retired last year, saying he has installed bullet-proof glass and blast-proof curtains at his home at his own expense.
Milley has often spoken out against Trump and relayed stories from his time in the Joint Chiefs from 2019 to 2023.
In a speech during his retirement ceremony, Milley infamously appeared to directly refer to Trump, who was then seeking to become the Republican presidential nominee.
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or tyrant or a dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” Milley said. “We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Woodward’s book has also revealed several other bombshells, including that Trump sent COVID-19 testing machines to Russian President Vladimir Putin for personal use in 2020 at the height of the pandemic and that he has had at least seven phone calls with Putin since leaving office.
The Hill has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.
Trumpkov clearly believes that publicly praising putler’s bum-chum Orban plays well with his fan base; and he seems to be right. Likewise sneering at “world’s greatest salesman” Zel plays well with his fan club.
His hypocrisy is off the scale; it’s been revealed by researchers working for comedian Jimmy Kimmel that Trumpkov’s “patriotic” $60 Bibles are in fact manufactured in bat pox land.
“Orban plays well with his fan base”
The US Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC) held their annual meeting in Hungary 2 years in a row, with Orbán as a featured speaker, and they also had Orbán speak at a CPAC meeting in Dallas.
So, it seems that there’s a lot of right-wingers in this country who love orbanus.
“CPAC Gives Standing Ovation to Autocrat Who Bashed ‘Mixed-Race’ Societies”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/viktor-orban-cpac-speech-standing-ovation-1392714/
Trump represents a clear and present danger to our country, to Ukraine, and to the entire free world. He’s already done a tremendous amount of damage to the Republican Party, ruining its reputation for years to come, to the reputation of the United States (which Biden is also guilty of), and he has done more harm to our relationships with our friends and allies than any other president in the history of our country. He is sand in the gearbox of US politics, water in its gas tank, he is Baphomet in the church of Christ. Voting for Trump is voting for a foolish, useful idiot of dictators. How much lower could we possibly sink?