Trump has kept up his old, creepy affections for Putin

A startled wife catches her husband in bed with another woman. The husband asks if she will believe him or her lying eyes.

So much for old jokes.

But it is no joke that former President Trump is asking Americans to close their eyes to his suspicious affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“You wonder, what does Putin have on Donald Trump that he always has to be beholden to him, his buddy in vileness?” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former House Speaker, bluntly said on MSNBC last week. “I don’t know what [Putin] has on [Trump] but I think it’s probably financial.”

Top Republicans are sounding the same alarm, usually in private but sometimes in public.

“Obviously, former President Trump is pushing” for the U.S. to break away from the NATO allies, Paul Ryan, a Republican and former House Speaker, told the Washington Post last week. 

“So, what I very much worry about is [that Trump and his followers] are helping curate a line of thought, a school of thought [inside the GOP] that is isolationist, that is pro-Putin, pro-Russia, pro-tyranny at the end of the day,” Ryan said of Trump’s coziness with Putin. “And that is extremely dangerous for all democracy but for us as ourselves as a democracy.”

The two former House leaders spoke out after House Republicans loyal to Trump refused to act on a bill to send money to Ukraine to help it resist Russia’s invasion.

Trump recently boasted that while president, he told a European leader that the U.S. would not defend NATO countries from a possible Russian attack, despite treaty agreements, unless they increased their military spending to meet NATO obligations.

“You didn’t pay?” Trump said. “You’re delinquent. No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage [Putin and the Russian army] to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.”

That prompted former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), Trump’s rival for the GOP nomination, to tell Fox News: “Trump just sided with a thug that kills his political opponents.”

There are more signs of an illicit relationship between Trump and Russia.

An FBI informant with ties to Russia was arrested in Las Vegas last week and charged with spreading lies about corruption by Trump’s opponent, President Biden, during the 2020 election campaign. 

The Justice Department’s special counsel said Alexander Smirnov is “actively peddling new lies that could impact [the 2024] election after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November,” according to the charging document.

Putin’s agents and internet trolls did intervene in the 2016 election to help Trump achieve a surprise win, according to a Report released in 2020. The Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that Russia continues to pose a “grave” danger to American democracy. 

After the 2016 campaign, the American Constitution Society wrote: “Trump associates repeatedly lied to investigators about their contacts with Russians, and President Trump refused to answer questions about his efforts to impede federal proceedings and influence the testimony of witnesses.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 race led to 37 indictments as well as seven cases that ended with people involved with the Trump campaign entering guilty pleas or being convicted.

The alarm over Trump’s relationship with Putin is increasing as the 2024 election, nears because of Russia is recently having more success against Ukrainian military forces.

“This happened in large part because Ukraine is running out of weapons due to congressional inaction,” said Jake Sullivan, the White House’s National Security Adviser. The “Ukrainian troops didn’t have the supplies and ammunition they needed to stop the Russian advance.”

The prospect of Russia gaining full control of Ukraine led NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, appearing at a recent global security conference in Munich, to conclude that Russia has a more ambitious agenda of conquering more of western Europe.

Stoltenberg said European intelligence agencies, according to The New York Times, have concluded “that in three to five years, Putin might attempt to test NATO’s credibility by attacking one of the countries on Russia’s borders, most probably a small Baltic nation.”

Even the murder of Putin’s leading domestic political rival, Alexei Navalny, elicited only mild regrets from Trump, who said the Putin dissident “would have been a lot better off staying away” from Russia.

Instead, Trump used Navalny’s demise to make the case that he is the victim of criminal indictments, showing the U.S. is “turning into a communist country in many ways.”

Trump told Fox News that a court finding that he lied about the value of his assets and owes $355 million in fines is “a form of Navalny…a form of communism, of fascism.”

Trump has said zero about a warning from the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee that  Russia might be about to disrupt Western satellite technology and interfere with consumer cell service as well as military navigation.

Before Trump took over the GOP, the party was a consistent opponent of Russian aggression.

Now the question is if they will ever open their eyes to the danger of a Trump-Putin alliance. Will that day come after Putin takes full control of Ukraine? 

The Trump party’s failure to support Ukraine is a threat to involve U.S. troops in a war to halt Russia’s advance.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.