Donald Trump ran on making America great again, but he has already severely damaged the very things the United States stood for, and thus injured our image internationally.
Donald Trump is already giving Russian President Vladimir Putin everything he ever dreamed of, and so much quicker than your average puppet could have done. Russia is laughing at the United States now, mocking its self destruction of the very values that made it stand in relief against an authoritarian dictatorship like Putin’s.
At destroying America, Donald Trump is the bigly best.
“Kremlin-controlled news outlets used to root for Donald Trump’s election. Now they’re reveling in the chaos and division of his early presidency,” Michael Crowley of Politico reported Tuesday.
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Politico ran through just a few of the headlines:
“Immigrants See American Dream Fade in Wake of Surge in Hate Crimes,†Sputnik News, another English language outlet bankrolled by the Kremlin, reported the same day.
“America is in the grips of hatred,†the Russian television commentator Dmitry Kiselyov told viewers of the Rossiya 1 network on Sunday night. The popular host, appointed directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggested the political discord could lead to violence in gun-friendly America — “a dangerous combination with free-flowing firearms,†he said.
“The original Russian state-controlled media fixation on Trump was that he was this destroying angel who would damage the established monopoly of two leading US political parties and lead a crusade against ‘bankrupt’ American elites,†Andrew Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment where he oversees research in Washington and Moscow on Russia, told Politico.
“… who would damage the established monopoly of two leading US political parties and lead a crusade against ‘bankrupt’ American elites” — Do those words sound familiar? Because it wasn’t just Trump fans who spouted them. This came from the far left and the far right and it was embraced by libertarians.
This entire narrative was deliberately planted and targeted toward young Americans, who ate it up for good reason. Yes, we have a problem in our political system. That problem is that Republicans have enabled corrupt corporate money to secretly influence legislation for their benefit, to the harm of the people.
It’s just that the solution to that was not to turn our backs on Hillary Clinton, ironically the only person in the general election who directly took on Citizens United and the NRA, in other words, the political influence of the dark money from elites.
But our country fell for the bait and elected the destroyer of American values out of rage over what they had been led to believe Hillary Clinton stood for. I warned about this during the election.
It was so easy to manipulate voters into hating Hillary Clinton. Perhaps that is partly on her as pundits keep insisting, but I can’t help but add in the variables of the entities she took on directly, all of the big, big players in dark money and Putin himself – he knew Clinton was no easy pushover; That is, the entities that fooled Americans into voting against their own self interest.
Perhaps Americans need someone with the charm of Obama to see through the distorting lens of dark money. If so, that is a lazy weakness of which the Kremlin took easy advantage.
As I keep repeating, Moscow’s goal wasn’t to get Donald Trump elected; they want to undermine western democracy, and they figured Donald Trump would be the best way to achieve this goal.
Already Trump is giving them headlines to make the U.S. a laughingstock. Which is to say, Donald Trump is destroying America for the Kremlin.
This was their goal, only it happened before Trump could return any of his promises to them. Who knew Trump would burn through his political capital so soon.
No matter to Putin, because the long goal is so much closer now that Trump has succeeded in dividing “gun-crazy” America.
Donald Trump still hasn’t figured out that he was used and that Russia is not in fact invested in his presidency at all. He has already given all of the gifts he had to give; already destroyed faith in democracy, instilled fear and questions about reality.
As I kept writing during the election, that was the goal of phase one. The Kremlin has a decades long plan to destroy western democracy, Donald Trump’s ignorance was just an early present.
The real danger here is not just the Russian puppet in the White House, but the undermining of the ideals that buttress western democracy and the chaos brought by an incompetent, mentally unstable president. The real danger here is the division and the feeling that we don’t know what’s real anymore.
The real coup is yet to come.
Lest this leave you depressed and demoralized, former President Barack Obama has said repeatedly – even knowing all of this – that he has faith in our democracy. Our democracy is fueled by the people. Speak up, speak out, be seen, be heard.
Yes, we can Yes, we did. Don’t forget it.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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