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Rick Wilson: "Trump and Putin: Two Bullshit Artists Enter Helsinki, One Comes Out Victorious"
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-and-putin-two-bullshit-artists-enter-helsinki-one-comes-out-victoriousAt first, I thought the closed-door, principals-only meeting between President Trump and Vladimir Putin would be a kind of Schrodinger’s Cat thought-exercise.
The famous physics gedanken experiment states we can never know if the notional cat is either alive or dead because any observation collapses the quantum field of possibilities. Given it was to be just Trump and Putin alone in a room, I expected that we’d never hear anything even close to the truth.
The press conference after the meeting proved me wrong; it showed us precisely what happened in that room. Donald Trump sold out his country to Russia, then proudly affirmed it, live on camera. A former intelligence agency chief just asked me, “If the Russians didn’t write Trump’s talking points, how could you tell?”
-snip-
Putin knew he was going to roll over Trump before he even walked into the room; while both men are experienced liars, Putin brought decades of KGB tradecraft and manipulation to the fight. He’s a wily head-gamer who rose to the top of the bloody Russian pyramid of political power. It’s worth reminding the American people for the thousandth time that the man in that room with Putin isn’t the character he played on The Apprentice.
On his best day, Trump is a dopey man-child, an egomaniacal narcissist who wears his many tells on his sleeve. Written across Trump’s soft, jowly face is a catalog of his blatantly obvious weaknesses—for flattery, money, sex, and status. He’s a walking catalog of the seven deadly sins, and even if Trump weren’t a man with a history of failed negotiations, blown deals, serial bankruptcies, rampant infidelities, wandering-cock syndrome, lousy business outcomes, and general stoogery, Putin would still be a formidable opponent.
By the end of the press conference, even Putin looked slightly embarrassed. He wanted Trump to go down in the third round like a bought-off boxer, but Trump kept laying it on thicker and thicker, swooning over the Russian leader, making winky-googly eyes, and repeating the worst tropes of Russia’s propaganda machine. Trump didn’t just roll over. He rolled over, stuck out his tongue, and begged Vladimir Putin to slap on a choke collar and rub his belly. An American president has never before abased himself like this before a foreign leader, and the horrified eyes of every American outside the Trump cult watched in horror.
-snip-
The famous physics gedanken experiment states we can never know if the notional cat is either alive or dead because any observation collapses the quantum field of possibilities. Given it was to be just Trump and Putin alone in a room, I expected that we’d never hear anything even close to the truth.
The press conference after the meeting proved me wrong; it showed us precisely what happened in that room. Donald Trump sold out his country to Russia, then proudly affirmed it, live on camera. A former intelligence agency chief just asked me, “If the Russians didn’t write Trump’s talking points, how could you tell?”
-snip-
Putin knew he was going to roll over Trump before he even walked into the room; while both men are experienced liars, Putin brought decades of KGB tradecraft and manipulation to the fight. He’s a wily head-gamer who rose to the top of the bloody Russian pyramid of political power. It’s worth reminding the American people for the thousandth time that the man in that room with Putin isn’t the character he played on The Apprentice.
On his best day, Trump is a dopey man-child, an egomaniacal narcissist who wears his many tells on his sleeve. Written across Trump’s soft, jowly face is a catalog of his blatantly obvious weaknesses—for flattery, money, sex, and status. He’s a walking catalog of the seven deadly sins, and even if Trump weren’t a man with a history of failed negotiations, blown deals, serial bankruptcies, rampant infidelities, wandering-cock syndrome, lousy business outcomes, and general stoogery, Putin would still be a formidable opponent.
By the end of the press conference, even Putin looked slightly embarrassed. He wanted Trump to go down in the third round like a bought-off boxer, but Trump kept laying it on thicker and thicker, swooning over the Russian leader, making winky-googly eyes, and repeating the worst tropes of Russia’s propaganda machine. Trump didn’t just roll over. He rolled over, stuck out his tongue, and begged Vladimir Putin to slap on a choke collar and rub his belly. An American president has never before abased himself like this before a foreign leader, and the horrified eyes of every American outside the Trump cult watched in horror.
-snip-
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