How Long Do We Allow Trump’s Insecurity To Damage Our Standing In The World?

Unfortunately, this makes perfect sense.

Senior White House officials are all in duck-and-cover mode over President Trump’s atrocious performance before the world on Monday. He rolled over and offered his soft underbelly to the nation’s greatest geopolitical foe, even as he strutted out of that debacle acting like a champ.

That was not rooted in reality.

For those who have to try and set the ship right, given how easily President Trump turned on his own nation and our intelligence community, it’s a walk on the tightrope, and they have to explain how this happened and what’s next.

For starters, we need to understand why this happened. Besides the fact that Trump has a huge man-crush on Putin, and Putin has something on Trump, as well.

According to these White House officials, it was insecurity and stubbornness that was the fertile soil for Trump’s acquiescence to Putin.

Trump, said one former senior White House official, is more afraid of looking illegitimate than of looking like a puppet for Putin.

“It’s the [fear] that it’s perceived as looking like he really didn’t win,” the official said of what was driving Trump’s behavior.

“If anyone expected Trump to stop being Trump precisely for those few hours of meeting with Putin, this was a wishful thinking by far,” Sergei Utkin, head of strategic assessment at the Moscow-based Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations, told The Daily Beast in an email.

There was also the theory that President Trump sees Russia and China becoming closer and hopes to head off any such political union by ingratiating himself to Putin.

In other words, he’ll roll over and be Putin’s prison wife, if it means the U.S. is given a spot above China.

It’s not a great strategy, but Trump is neither a strategist, nor is he the great negotiator he would have us believe.

He’s an oft-bankrupted, 1980s punchline and that’s pretty much it.

Never has it been more apparent that the United States, and in particular, the GOP made a mistake by allowing Trump to assume any level of power.

“I honestly had little to no good expectations for this,” said a senior Trump political appointee who works on issues surrounding Russian disinformation efforts, adding that the event “went about as well as I expected.”

“Trump looked incredibly weak up there. Putin looks like a champion,” the official continued. “I’d like to say I’m shocked, but this is the world in which we live now.”

Nobody expects much from Trump, as a leader. They all knew this was a horrible mistake. So why did nobody stop it?

Well, he’s the president, and the GOP no longer possess a spine.

Still, some spoke out against what we saw on Monday.

“Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.”

Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) also had some thoughts.

“This event ended up being far worse than I thought it would be, rhetorically. Hopefully, no deals were made and nothing happened,” Corker said in an interview. “The president can do more damage in 15 minutes to that relationship than all of us working together for months can overcome. That’s the problem here.”

Others, such as North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued statements supportive of our intelligence community.

Vladimir Putin is not our friend and never has been. Nor does he want to be our friend. His regime’s actions prove it. pic.twitter.com/W95VPf9T8Y

— Richard Burr (@SenatorBurr) July 16, 2018

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has never shied away from speaking his mind about President Trump. He called out Monday’s events for what they were – a win for Putin.