Trump’s love letters to Putin

On balance Putin was far more comfortable with Trump. Trump is fascinated by autocrats, and greatly desires people to like him. Thus he is more malleable for Putin. That doesn’t mean Trump always did what Putin wanted, but there was enough common goals for Putin to not oppose Trump. Trump showed no interest in opposing Putin. Trump was openly hostile to NATO. Trump was not particularly beholden to Democracy in general. Trump only viewed Ukraine and Zelenski in a transactional manner, as an avenue for him to pursue dirt and against Hillary and Biden.

Would Putin have invaded Ukraine with Trump. Hard to say. Putin had already been building up forces there, but they accelerated with Biden in office. That was likely less about Biden, and more about Zelenski openly talking about NATO once Trump was out. He knew Trump didn’t give a shit either way.

 

there's an obv reason for the lack of love letters....when you hold up a dude's poster with 1 baby hand for 4 years & the other baby hand is ummm, occupied, how you gonna write?

gee, I wonder who the pitcher was....

 

In this I actually can’t say NTTAWWT.

 

He lost get over it lol. No one’s perfect.

Listen it’s interesting to ponder Russian calculus on invading Ukraine in a timeline where trump has won re election. Knowing what we know now, maybe they don’t because why would they? Trump was already fracturing nato, we had our worst relationship with our Allies post-ww2, he was obsessed with fighting China, so really, Russia has their two biggest geopolitical rivals fighting and NATO was weak. At that point it would just be business as usual. Maybe the next move would have been Moldova instead of Ukraine because no one would have cared that much. But the truth is we’ll never know for sure. Perhaps something happened internally in Russia that we’ll never fully understand and putins invasion was inevitable.

another interesting question then, given sour western relations, is if Trump would have organized a legit defense of Ukraine or just facilitated a land grab agreement for the Russians to make the war go away? Cause I struggle to see him do the coalition building that Biden is doing. And he certainly wouldnt have wanted a prolonged conflict that worsened inflationary pressure.

 

This was hysterical. No one had a healthy fear of Trump except to the extent we had a bat shit crazy president who knew nothing about foreign policy and MIGHT do something stupid. The leaders of our allies openly laughed behind his back. He might very well have pulled us out of NATO or at least rendered it impotent. Putin was shocked at the degree of success Biden had getting NATO and the EU to get so solidly behind Ukraine. Trump could have never done that, he was a standing joke. Trump owed his presidency to Putin, he wasn't going to piss him off too badly. He might huff and puff...and God knows there was no one better at threatening to wreak havoc on our enemies, but when it came right down to it, Stormy Daniels was correct about Trump, all show and no go.

If Trump had won in 2020, Ukraine would be a Russian state by now.

 

I’m still waiting for the war the left said Trump was going to get us in with China or Iran to break out.
Also waiting to Biden to cancel all those terrible tariffs against China the left was screaming about.

 

Biden hated those tariffs so much he cancelled them week 1 of his presidency…. oops that’s wrong he still has them in place.

 

You make like Trump is this master 3 dimensional chess player, when in fact most mornings he was watching Fox and friends. You have created your own fantasy about what Trump is and what he isn’t.

Putin has been very open for his preference for Trump. It’s not open for debate. As to Xi, it’s more complex. Yes, Trump was tougher on China with tariffs. Perhaps justifiably so. But at the end of the day, what did the tariffs accomplish? They certainly didn’t cause China to act any differently. They did raise some revenue, by taxing US corporations that bought from China.

If Trump was serious about China he wouldn’t have cancelled TPP on day one, which would have been a big economic and geopolitical win vs China, far more than his subsequent tariffs. To this day I think it was one of the most harmful and stupid things Trump did.

 

In spite of your desires, the evidence still heavily supports toward a wet market origin of the virus. There is significant evidence, although not conclusive, or set market origin. There really isn’t any evidence as far as I know of that directly purports to a lab leak.

 

So what exactly have the tariffs accomplished? I’m not necessarily opposed to them, but what have they accomplished? And why did he shit can TPP?

No Biden hasn’t reversed them, because China hasn’t done anything to earn their reversal.

 

The point that I was marking is that Trump was vilified for the tariffs, if they were so terrible and harmful why didn’t Biden cancel day one.

 

this! Watched it right here on TH, knew it was BS. Crickets since day 1

 

Like I said before, I’m not explicitly against the tariffs. Whether they have done more good than harm I really don’t know. They did raise more revenue, and they taxed US corporations who traded with China.

Other than raising some revenue, did they accomplish anything? They haven’t changed China’s behavior. They may have made the situation worse.

Why didn’t Biden reverse them? One, Biden was never a free trade kind of guy in the fist place. Two, once a punitive policy is in place against an enemy or an antagonist you don’t just reverse it, without particular concessions.

Ok so what about TPP?