Donald Trump is very bad at making the case that he’s not Russia’s favored candidate in the 2016 USA election.
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In a Thursday column, Kurtz interpreted Trump’s lines as “obviously sarcastic”-the defense that the Republican nominee himself offered up”.
Whatever the actual intent, for Russian observers, it conjured amusement as much as anything.
To properly act out the diabolus ex machina part in which he has been cast, Putin ought to intervene on both sides and ask the hackers – and the rest of Russia’s intelligence apparatus, which presumably isn’t limited to APT 28 and APT 29 – to look for some missing documents.
So if what Trump said could “constitute treason”, as law professor Laurence Tribe put it, what would he call cavalierly leaving classified information vulnerable to America’s enemies? “And, for us, it’s very entertaining”. “(Russian President Vladimir) Putin should stay out of this election”. While they say Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric sounds appealing to Russians, there is much debate whether Trump would actually come through on his promises of better relations with Moscow – something that past U.S. presidential candidates have promised and not realized. “Now Mr. Trump is openly appealing to him to do so”. “We always go through this”.
“It can’t be denied that there is a huge interest in the things Trump is saying”, he says.
But recognizing Crimea as Russian territory is not something that basically anybody inside the American foreign policy mainstream is “looking at”. And, of course, nobody has any hopeful expectations for Hillary either.
The spotlight turned on Russian Federation last weekend, after WikiLeaks published hacked Democratic Party emails on its site. “This is a fantastic turn of events”, says Mr. Lukyanov.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange also wants to embarrass Clinton for impinging on “freedom of speech”. He claims there are plenty more such revelations to come. By their nature, these aren’t reliable allies – neither Putin nor anyone else knows what may come out of them. But Democrats still called Trump to account.
You don’t have to be John Le Carre to see how today’s bromance between Putin and Trump may be just the tip of the iceberg of a new Russian conspiracy to influence the US 2016 presidential election, defeating Hillary Clinton, just as earlier this year Putin apparently influenced the UK’s Brexit vote. “We’re not taking our cue from the Kremlin, we’re speaking for ourselves”. We can count on blowback, and Trump may rue the day he befriended Putin.
A few months before that, Trump retweeted a graphic that claimed that 81 percent of murdered white people are killed by Black people.
His running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of IN, tried to distance himself from Trump. “And he is undeniably outstanding”, says Vladimir Posner, who has spent decades working in both USA and Russian media, and now hosts one of the country’s top interview shows, “Posner”, on state-run Channel One.
“The reality is I don’t take Donald Trump as using that type of humor”, he said.
Pletka said Trump’s foreign policy statements might be playing into Putin’s hands. According to the Washington Post, Trump did schedule a face-to-face with Putin, but the meeting was canceled by the Russian president at the last minute. “Nobody serious thinks that”, Pletka told ABC News.
Trump later said he was being sarcastic when he prodded Russian Federation to unearth Clinton’s missing emails.
“If anyone thinks this will endear him to Putin, I am not so sure”, Mr. Konovalov adds.
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But, after nearly two weeks of Conventions, there is one area of Republican foreign policy that Trump has completely reinvented in his image: the Party’s posture toward Russian Federation. The United Nations General Assembly, in a hundred-to-eleven vote, has called on countries not to recognize Crimea as part of Russian Federation.
