Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that his Democratic opponent in the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin just days before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Trump said in a speech in North Carolina: “Remember when Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine. She met with Putin, and then three days later, he attacked. How did she do? Do you think she did a good job? She met with Putin to tell him, ‘Don’t do it.’ And three days later, he attacked; that’s when the attack started. Did you know that, General?” (Retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg was at the North Carolina event.)
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Harris has never met with Putin. In reality, she met with US allies, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the Munich Security Conference in the days before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Putin was not at the conference.
“Frankly speaking, I cannot recall a single contact between President Putin and Mrs. Harris,” a Kremlin spokesperson said last month, according to a state-owned Russian news agency.
The Biden administration was still trying to deter an invasion of Ukraine at the time of Harris’ 2022 trip to the conference in Germany, but top administration officials, including President Joe Biden himself, made clear that they believed Putin was already moving toward invading. As Harris was on her way to Germany, Biden told reporters that he thought a Russian attack “will happen in the next several days.”
CNN reported on the day the Munich conference began that a senior administration official said Harris had three key objectives: “Focus on the ‘fast-changing’ situation on the ground, maintain full alignment with partners and send a clear message to Russia that the US prefers diplomacy but is ready in case of Russian aggression.”
This is a total fabrication. It’s unclear if he’s simply confused about the Munich conference or if he’s just made it up out of whole cloth but either way that alleged confrontation where she told Putin “don’t do that” and he ignored her and did it anyway is so absurd it makes your head hurt. But when you recall that Trump routinely says that he told Putin that same thing and Putin submissively cowered and agreed never to do such a thing.
That is also total BS, of course. Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger:
Vladimir Putin exploited Donald Trump’s “ego and insecurities” to exert an almost mesmeric hold over the former US president, who refused to entertain any negative evaluation of the autocratic Russian leader from his own staff, and ultimately fired his national security adviser, HR McMaster, over it.
The bold assessment of Trump’s fealty to Putin comes in McMaster’s book At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, published by HarperCollins and arriving on 27 August. The Guardian obtained a copy.
“After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump,” McMaster recalls saying in the memoir covering the turbulent 457 days the now retired general served as national security adviser from February 2017 until he was effectively fired by tweet in April 2018.
The comment, to McMaster’s wife, Katie, came in the aftermath of the poisoning in the UK by Putin’s agents of Sergei Skripal, a Russian former intelligence officer, and his daughter, in March 2018.
While other western leaders were beginning to formulate a strong response to the assassination attempt, McMaster says, Trump sat in the White House fawning over a New York Post article with the headline: “Putin heaps praise on Trump, pans US politics”. Trump, according to the book, wrote an appreciative note on the article with a black Sharpie and asked McMaster “to get the clipping to Putin”.
All they had to do was offer some phony flattery and he was in the palm of their hands. Putin, Xi, MBS, Kim, Bolsonaro all of them.
He can’t be allowed back into power at a time when the fascist right is making a move all over the world. He is their puppet, and he would have the most powerful economy and military in the world.