Why Putin keeps outsmarting Trump
The Kremlin leader is trained to lie. Trust me, I ran the CIA: Believing anything he says is folly.
By JOHN MCLAUGHLIN 11/19/17, 4:10 AM CET Updated 11/19/17, 12:17 PM CET
When the Art of the Deal meets the KGB, the KGB will always win. That’s the main thing I took away from this past weekend’s strange episode of President Donald Trump seeming to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin actually believes Russia did not meddle in our 2016 election.
Following his meeting with Putin in Vietnam, Trump initially gave the impression that he accepted Putin’s assurances. The president later sought to clarify that he continued to accept the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies (“as currently led by fine people”) that Russia had interfered but thinks Putin actually believes Russia did not. Along the way, the president took a swipe at intelligence agency leaders from the Obama era — specifically, James Clapper (director of National Intelligence), John Brennan (CIA director) and James Comey (FBI director) — calling them “political hacks.”
What to make of this bizarre chapter?
First, in all likelihood, the president probably really believes what he first said. Hard as it is to apply logic to Trumpisms, let’s try. If the intelligence community assessment was produced under the leadership of “political hacks” and if the president means it when he calls the Russia investigation a “hoax” (his most frequent characterization of it), then it’s only logical that he doubts the intelligence assessment and finds Putin’s denial congenial.
Prediction: It’s only a matter of time before he returns to his first instinct — that it’s all a “hoax.” That’s the pattern of the Charlottesville controversy. Following his clenched-teeth reading of a telepromted walk-back of his first imprudent remarks, he eventually went on a rant that, rightly or wrongly, raised questions about his earlier condemnation of neo-Nazi groups.
more
https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-putin-why-keeps-outsmarting/
= new reply since forum marked as read
He isn't.
