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‘Propaganda bulls**t’: WaPo columnist taken to the woodshed for blaming Russian aggression on Trump

December 11, 2021 | | Print Article

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A far-left columnist for The Washington Post is being ruthlessly ridiculed for his extraordinary take that former President Donald Trump is to blame for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s newfound aggression toward Ukraine.

But according to columnist David Ignatius, this theory makes sense.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s path toward threatening an invasion of Ukraine is marked by reckless actions. In this move toward defiance of international norms, Putin has been subtly encouraged by former president Donald Trump, a fellow traveler in recklessness,” Ignatius writes.

“We don’t need any conspiratorial analysis of Trump’s links with Russia to make this case. We just need look at the facts. Trump has been sympathetic to Putin in public statements for nearly a decade. As for Ukraine, Trump was so heedless of its security that he conditioned U.S. military aid on political favors in the famous 2019 phone call that resulted in his first impeachment,” he continues.

An impeachment that led to his first acquittal, FYI …

The remainder of the piece details how Trump’s rhetoric — the words out of his mouth — are to somehow blame for Putin lining Ukraine’s border with Russian troops.

For instance, here’s how one passage reads: “Trump’s response to Putin’s defiance of norms has often been to normalize Russian behavior. When Bill O’Reilly, then with Fox News, called Putin a killer during a February 2017 interview, Trump responded, ‘There are a lot of killers. … Do you think our country is so innocent?'”

Missing from Ignatius’s “analysis” is any mention of the former president’s actions. According to Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake, who previously worked as a senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, Trump’s actions toward Russia from 2017 to January 2021 tell an entirely different story.

Look:

Notice how Lake doesn’t spare Trump any criticism, arguing in his tweets that the former president’s rhetoric was “provocative and dangerous.”

But unlike Ignatius, Lake also admits the positives, such as Trump’s decision to arm Ukraine and, more importantly, to enforce sanctions on the Nordstream 2 pipeline.

Democrat President Joe Biden, on the other hand, has taken a different path. In May, for example, he greenlit the pipeline, which critics have warned will provide Russia with massive control over the supply of natural gas in Europe.

And according to the latest reports, the current president is planning to hand Putin further concessions in response to his recent aggression toward Ukriane. According to Lake, these concessions are a bad idea.

“Biden has offered Putin what the White House is calling ‘diplomatic off-ramps.’ Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, on Tuesday described these off-ramps as support for the largely moribund peace process based on the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015, and an invitation for Putin to engage in consultations with NATO over his concerns about the alliance,” Lake writes for Bloomberg.

“These off-ramps risk letting Putin believe that he can erase Ukrainian sovereignty through diplomacy. The Russian president has already pressed Biden, according to the Kremlin’s readout of their Tuesday conference call, to give him assurances that the U.S. would oppose allowing Ukraine into NATO. Putin’s diplomats have also favored an interpretation of the Minsk agreements that would grant Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk nearly full autonomy from the central government in Kiev, while denying that any of its forces are in those regions,” he continues.

Meanwhile, even the left-wing Brookings Institution admits that Trump’s tough actions toward Russia “seemed at odds” with his publicly flattering rhetoric toward Putin.

As proof, the left-wing think tank cites 52 actions, including dozens of sanctions, several indictments, a declaration rejecting Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the expulsion of Russian intelligence officers, the killing of Russian-backed Syrian forces, and the delivery of weapons to Ukraine.

Weighed again Biden’s incessant concessions to Putin, the former president’s actions make Ignatius’s column come off as nothing more than “propaganda,” according to critics.

Look:

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Vivek Saxena
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