R&I – TxPAT ***
You would think that given the fact Donald Trump was impeached for illegally withholding congressionally approved aid to Ukraine, his supporters might take the current crisis as an opportunity to have a seat.
You would think that since Trump in June 2020 advocated for drawing down U.S. troops in Germany, and after having spent years weakening NATO with his attacks and criticisms, that the current urgent need for strength within the Western alliance would have Trumpists hitting their own mute buttons.
You would think that with Russia threatening the international order over the possibility of invading a sovereign neighbor, the Trump-cheering section would dial it down a bit given the 45th president’s signature public toadying to Vladimir Putin, the man who singlehandedly created the current crisis.
You might even think that since the response of the Biden administration to the current Russian threat has been dramatically more robust than the responses of the last three administrations to Putin’s aggressions, incursions, and violations of international law, that Team Trump might even offer up a little praise for the current president. After all, even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell did, for goodness sakes. There are vital national security interests at stake, after all.
This is precisely the sort of moment when, historically, America’s political parties have tried to tone down their partisan bickering and present a united front to the world. But no, not this GOP.
Even with Trump not occupying the White House, Republicans and the warped cogs in their giant message machine continue to see their mission as strengthening not the U.S. and our allies, but Russia; and serving not the national interests, but their own political self-interests.
Drawing on the Trump playbook, their approach is not only facts be damned, but that history never happened. It is once again: “Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?”
They are taking short-term memory loss and turning into a movement, making cognitive dysfunction a requirement for admission into a MAGA fairyland in which rivers of Fox News disinformation continue to flow from the well-springs of Russian propaganda, in which heroes are magically transformed into villains, friends into enemies, and good into evil.
(Remember the hubbub in 2020 about science possibly having discovered a parallel universe in which key laws of physics were reversed? Sorry, science, but we did not need a complicated experiment in Antarctica searching for high-energy particles from outer space to find it. All you had to do was watch Tucker Carlson, the top-rated Fox News host who has gone so far off the deep end with his pro-Kremlin rants that even Russian media is worried his lunacy reflects badly on them.)
3rd_Party_Yesterday
Article URL : https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-cheerleaders-forget-how-weak-he-was-with-putin?source=articles&via=twitter_page