Republicans
denounce Trump’s defense of ‘killer’ Putin
Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Russian president is ‘a thug.’
By MIKE
ZAPLER 2/5/17, 8:11 PM CET Updated 2/5/17, 8:21 PM CET
Donald Trump’s
defense of Vladimir Putin’s homicidal history isn’t sitting well
with fellow Republicans.
Three Republican
senators and several other conservatives were quick to condemn or
distance themselves from the president seeming to put Putin on equal
standing with the United States when it comes to killing.
In a pre-taped Fox
interview partially released on Saturday and set to air in full
during the Super Bowl pre-game show, Bill O’Reilly pressed Trump on
his warm relationship with Putin.
Trump stressed that
stronger U.S.- Russia ties could help defeat the Islamic State.
But “Putin’s a
killer,” O’Reilly said.
“You got a lot of
killers,” Trump shot back. “What, you think our country’s so
innocent?”
Trump’s repeated
expressions of admiration for Putin was already a sore spot for
Republicans who consider the Russian leader a threat to the
post-World-War-II global order. The president’s latest statement
has put the breach right back in the spotlight.
“He’s a thug,”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said of Putin on CNN’s
“State of the Union.” “The Russians annexed Crimea, invaded
Ukraine and messed around in our elections. No, I don’t think
there’s any equivalency between the way the Russians conduct
themselves and the way the United States does.”
When host Jake
Tapper responded that Republicans would have been in revolt if Barack
Obama said something similar, McConnell, who’s made a point of not
harshly criticizing Trump, made clear his opinion on the matter.
“I’m not going
to critique the president’s every utterance,” the Senate leader
said. “But I do think America is exceptional, America is different.
We don’t operate in any way the way the Russians do. I think
there’s a clear distinction here that all Americans understand and
I would not have characterized it that way.”
Was McConnell
confident that Trump understood? Tapper asked. “I obviously don’t
see this issue the same way he does,” McConnell replied.
The Republican
leader wasn’t alone in his discomfort.
“When has a
Democratic political activists been poisoned by the GOP, or vice
versa? We are not the same as #Putin,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a
Russia hawk, tweeted Sunday.
And Sen. Ben Sasse
(R-Neb.), a persistent Trump critic throughout and since the election
season, had a similar take.
“Putin is an enemy
of political dissent. The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the
right for people to argue free from violence about places or ideas
that are in conflict,” Sasse said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“There is no moral equivalency between the United States of
America, the greatest freedom living nation in the history of the
world and the murderous thugs that are in Putin’s defense of his
cronyism.”
Some conservative
writers were more blunt.
“Trump puts US on
moral par with Putin’s Russia,” the Wall Street Journal’s Bret
Stephens tweeted. “Never in history has a President slandered his
country like this.”
Vice President Mike
Pence was forced to play cleanup on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Asked if Trump was
creating a “moral equivalency,” Pence said: “No, not in the
least.”
“President Trump
has been willing to be critical of our country’s actions in the
past. But what you’re hearing there is a determination by the
president of the United States to not let semantics or the arguments
of the past get in the way of exploring the ability to work together
with Russia and with President Putin in the days ahead.”
Pence was pressed by
host Chuck Todd whether Trump was essentially saying Putin is “a
bad guy, but we’ve done some bad things, too.”
“Again, I don’t
accept that it’s a moral equivalency,” Pence said. “I really
don’t, Chuck.”
Authors:
Mike Zapler
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