Donald Trump, back when he was president, sent his buddy over in Russia, Vladimir Putin, a batch of COVID test machines for Putin’s personal use, and kept it secret, at the request of Putin, who warned Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody, because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”
How do you like them apples?
Some of us are old enough to remember Trump making Democratic state governors at the outset of the pandemic literally beg him publicly for ventilators.
And here he was, just giving stuff away to the dictator of a country with thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at us.
“This guy who is president of the United States is sending them to Russia? To a murderous dictator for his personal use?” was the response of Vice President Kamala Harris, when the topic was broached by Howard Stern in an interview on Tuesday.
The revelation about the COVID test machine gift comes from a new book by journalist Bob Woodward, excerpts of which were released on Tuesday.
Team Trump, of course, threw out a denial on the Putin-COVID machine anecdote, and another tidbit from Woodward about Trump having had seven personal, private phone calls with Putin since leaving the White House in 2021.
“None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” said Steven Cheung, the communications director for the Trump campaign.
“Woodward is an angry, little man and is clearly upset because President Trump is successfully suing him because of the unauthorized publishing of recordings he made previously,” said Cheung, who, incidentally, is 5’10”, which is to say, not exactly somebody who should be calling somebody else a “little man.”
“President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue. Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality,” the not-even-six-feet-tall Cheung said.
Those of us old enough to remember Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein breaking the Watergate story that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon have other ideas on the quality of Woodward’s reporting, particularly vis-à-vis the truthiness of Trump, who either did or didn’t visit Gaza, the latest among his millions of public lies.
The insults being key to the response say a lot, though.
We got something similar from JD Vance, Trump’s Mike Pence stand-in, fated, like Pence, to be thrown to the MAGA wolves when the campaign falls flat next month.
“I honestly didn’t know that Bob Woodward was still alive until you just asked me that question,” the smug, as usual, Vance told a reporter, by way of trying to deflect on the topic.
“What little I know about Bob Woodward is that he is, I’m going to use I’m going to use a word here, he is a hack, the guy is a hack,” said Vance, who we only know about because of his hack best-seller spinning his middle-class upbringing in the Midwest as somehow making him an expert on poor people in Appalachia.
More revealing: Vance sees nothing wrong with the idea of Trump palling around with Putin.
“Even if it’s true, look, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?” Vance said, ignoring the obvious, that it is very much an issue, namely, a possible federal crime.
What else is new there with Trump, right?
“I believe that Donald Trump has this desire to be a dictator. He admires strongmen and he gets played by them because he thinks that they’re his friends and they are manipulating him full time and manipulating him by flattery and with favor,” Harris said on her spot on Howard Stern’s radio show.
She later added:
“You’re getting played, and some would say, look, I grew up in the neighborhood, some would say you’re getting punked,” Harris said.
Checks out.
Video: Trump loves him some Russia
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Chris Graham
