Trump Brags About How Much Putin Loves Him. NO RUSSIA! NO RUSSIA!

No homo!

Remember back in 2001 when George W. Bush claimed to have forged a deep, spiritual connection with Vladimir Putin?

“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” the then-president said, adding “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

And we all laughed and laughed, because those were simpler times. (Yes, yes, we do know that Dubya was really bad.)

Donald Trump also has thoughts about Vladimir Putin’s eyes. Namely, that he himself is the apple of them, and thus the Russian dictator would never have invaded Ukraine were Trump still in the White House.

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“Putin would have never gone into Ukraine, but that was just one my relationship with him, my personality over his,” he assured very serious journalist Larry Kudlow, AKA his own former economic advisor. “I used to speak to him, was the apple of his eye, but I said ‘don’t ever do it.’ It was, you know, tough stuff there.”

Well, it’s a lot. Although, it’s more or less exactly what one would expect from a guy who stole an oversize “love note” from the murderous North Korean despot.

Here on Planet Earth, Donald Trump spent the entirety of the 2016 campaign playing footsie with the Kremlin, even as he insisted that Putin would obviously prefer the pantsuit lady for president. And now that Trump has actually invaded Ukraine again, MAGAworld castigates the West for provoking Mother Russia with its talk of letting Ukraine join NATO and blames Ukrainians for refusing to hand their country over to Russia. Not exactly “tough stuff.”

In the lead up to his remarks on Putin, Trump and Kudlow engaged in extensive argle-bargle on the tried-and-true policy of “trade wars are good and easy to win.” Trump then tied his economic policies to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “he wouldn’t have done it for another reason, and maybe this is even stronger.”

“We, with this green energy, drove up oil, the oil price so high where he was getting close to $125 a barrel,” Trump insisted. “He made so much money that he was able to go and prosecute the war.”

This is of course such an insane amalgam of lies and half-truths it’s almost impossible to debunk — it’s his signature move! For starters: the Green New Deal was never enacted; the price of oil was wildly depressed in 2020 thanks to a price war between Russia and the Saudis in February, hilariously timed to coincide with a global pandemic that hit in April; OPEC finally stepped in and restored order by cutting production when global demand collapsed during COVID; the price of a barrel of oil briefly spiked above $120 in March of 2023 because of the invasion of Ukraine; and it’s currently back down around $80.

All of which Larry Kudlow knows perfectly well, although he bobbled his head in a maniacal show of agreement throughout the interview. And you could tell Trump’s supporters this stuff — even pointing them to a chart of historical oil prices — but they’d just accuse you of being in the pocket of Soros, and you’d be no better off than when you started.

In summary and in conclusion, Trump and Putin sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. He admitted it, and you know that guy would never lie.

Catch Liz Dye on Opening Arguments podcast.

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