Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Trump, Putin, and Us, Again

Donald Trump has been inconsistent on many things — his immigration views, for example — but he has been utterly consistent on Putin: He admires him. He hails him as a “strong leader.” And he cites poll numbers to assert Putin’s popularity in Russia.
He did all this again tonight. And this put me in mind of George W. Bush, whom I interviewed earlier this year.
We were talking about dictators and their methods of maintaining control. One method is to imprison opponents. Another is to monopolize the media. Bush brought up Putin, unprompted. “People say, ‘He’s the most popular guy in Russia.’ I say, ‘Yeah, I’d be popular too if I owned NBC’” (and the other networks, presumably).
Today’s GOP is very different from Bush’s, of course. The GOP nominee, Trump, obviously admires Putin a lot more than he does Bush (or Mitt Romney or John McCain, to cite the recent Republican nominees). He asserts that Bush lied our country into war, and that he should have been impeached.
Say this for Bush: He knows about democracies and dictatorships, and he knows the differences between them. And he is foursquare for democracy.
Read the rest of Jay Nordlinger's op-ed HERE.

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