Where is Trump getting his briefings?
by digby
People are wondering where Trump is getting his misinformation about Soviet history.
“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. … The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.”
That is, uh, wrong. And it isn’t coming from Fox News or Breitbart. There is literally only one source for this bit of propaganda: Putin’s political party.
Here are the segments from tonight's show about Donald Trump's strange fluency in Russian propaganda:
Part 1: https://t.co/IYMc7yfiuUPart 2: https://t.co/sYXeE4j8BP https://t.co/KBTh1IrGpo— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) January 4, 2019
Remember, he’s taken private advice from Vladimir Putin on North Korea, to the benefit of Russia.
Donald Trump left this week’s summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un having granted a huge last-minute concession: promising to stop what he called “war games” with South Korea.
The move reportedly blindsided both Seoul and US military officials.
Trump may have got that idea from an unusual source, the Wall Street Journal reports (paywall):
Trump had an idea about how to counter the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, which he got after speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin: If the U.S. stopped joint military exercises with the South Koreans, it could help moderate Kim Jong Un’s behavior.
That discussion between Putin and Trump reportedly happened in summer 2017. The pair have only met twice themselves, on the sidelines of diplomatic gatherings in Germany in July 2017 and in Vietnam that November.
Russia has encouraged de-escalation talks between the US and North Korea. Today, the Kremlin publicly congratulated itself for supporting the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore, Reuters reported. “Putin was right,” a spokesman said. “The only possible path is one of direct dialogue.”
Using the military exercises as a massive negotiating chip in exchange for the North denuclearizing is a pretty orthodox policy proposal, but it stunned almost everybody that Trump seemed to be giving this away for free after his meeting.
Maybe all those private conversations at their meetings included other advice and “history lessons.”
Trump is an unschooled cretin who knows nothing about anything. And he’s also made it quite clear that he doesn’t trust any of his advisers or the intelligence community. Instead he publicly takes the word of Vladimir Putin over the election interference over and over again. Is it really absurd to think that Putin would feed him this sort of misinformation? I certainly think it’s possible.
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