And there was nothing there.
Trump keeps saying that the reason Putin invaded Ukraine is because of the “rigged” election. He’s right in a way. It was the election, which wasn’t rigged. I think we all know that Putin was waiting for Trump to do his dirty work for him and when Trump lost, he went to plan B. John Bolton confirmed it:
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said on Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was waiting for former President Donald Trump to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if he had won a second term.
Bolton made the remarks during a virtual event with the Washington Post on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Bolton mostly offered critiques of current President Joe Biden’s foreign policy in the region. At the end of the event, he was asked by the Post’s Michael Duffy about how close Trump came to withdrawing the country from NATO, a translantic security alliance that includes the United States, Canada, and most of Europe.
“I thought he put his foot over it, but at least he didn’t withdraw then,” said Bolton, who wrote in his memoir about Trump’s consideration of withdrawing from NATO in 2018. “In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO. And I think Putin was waiting for that.”
Trump viewed NATO as a liability during his presidency, believing that European countries were not paying enough of their fair share of the burden of providing defense to the alliance. Bolton, a State Department official during the George W. Bush administration, was brought on to be Trump’s national security advisor in 2018 only to be ousted a year and a half later.
Bolton’s latest comments come just days after he told Newsmax that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was,” pushing back on a host who said the former president had been “tough on Russia.”
Asked whether he was satisfied by how the Trump administration handled Ukraine, Bolton criticized his former boss.https://www.youtube.com/embed/8yn1esLdK8o
“I think it went very badly,” said Bolton. “It was hard to have discussions on geostrategic issues when the president’s main interest was getting… Rudy Giuliani in to see [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky so they could go find Hillary Clinton’s computer server.
He added that Ukraine’s position in the “maelstrom of American presidential politics” in the last few years made it difficult for Zelensky to establish a proper relationship with the United States, which Bolton said was Ukraine’s “potentially most important supporter.”
In his conversation with golfer John Daly yesterday, he said Putin didn’t move on Ukraine because Trump told him he would bomb Moscow if he did it. I mean, it’s so ridiculous you’d have to laugh if it weren’t so serious. It’s like something out of Strangelove. Or South Park.
The fact is that like most of the world, Putin saw that Trump was a pathetic joke so far out of his depth that he could be as easily manipulated as an eight year old child. He believed he could get him to do his bidding while at the same time watch him destroy America from within. It made sense.