Reverence for Putin on the Right Buys Trump Cover
By JEREMY W. PETERSJULY 14, 2017
WASHINGTON — Years before the words “collusion” and “Russian hacking” became associated with President Vladimir V. Putin, some prominent Republicans found far more laudatory ways to talk about the Russian leader.
“Putin decides what he wants to do, and he does it in half a day,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and longtime friend and adviser to President Trump, gushed in 2014.
Mr. Putin was worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, K. T. McFarland said in 2013, before going on to serve a brief and ill-fated stint as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser.
“A great leader,” “very reasoned,” and “extremely diplomatic,” was how Mr. Trump himself described Mr. Putin that same year.
Though such fondness for Mr. Putin fell outside the Republican Party’s mainstream at the time, it became a widely held sentiment inside the conservative movement by the time Mr. Trump started running for president in 2015. And it persists today, despite evidence of Russian intervention in the 2016 American election and Mr. Putin’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies at home.
The veneration of Mr. Putin helps explain why revelations about Russia’s involvement in the election — including recent reports that members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle set up a meeting at which they expected a representative of the Russian government to give them incriminating information about Hillary Clinton — and Mr. Trump’s reluctance to acknowledge it, have barely penetrated the consciousness of the president’s conservative base.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/us/politics/putin-trump-conservatives.html?emc=edit_th_20170715&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284&_r=0
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with the re-election of Obama and the re-ascension of then-Prime Minister Putin as President of Russia after then-President Medvedev chose not to stand for another term and recommended handing it back to Putin (where they switched positions).
This is also when Grover Norquist gave his famous speech (February 11, 2012), the gist of which is compiled below -
ALL of this happened in 2012. In 2014, the GOP re-took the Senate and in 2016, Drumpf was elected as the robot with "enough working digits to sign this stuff" (and although this was technically the year that Rmoney was running, I doubt he would have fit Norquist's criteria of a mannequin who would "not tell them what direction to go"
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