I’m still laughing. You know, I thought that the G20 meeting was supposed to be a serious matter, between serious world leaders. That swing-your-arm-back-a-foot, loud slap, thumb grab handshake between the two international pariahs, Putin and MBS that I was yesterday was the most juvenile display in the history of diplomacy. It looked like a couple of failed frat pledges who just scored a kegger to drown their sorrows.
But such childish shenanigans aside, the spotlight was on the Cheeto Prophet, as it always seems to be at these moments. Trump once again made news by announcing that he was cancelling his one-on-one with Putin over the situation with Ukraine. Here is a guy who changed the GOP convention platform to bar giving the Ukraine lethal defensive weapons, but now he’s got his panties in a bunch over a fender bender between a Russian warship and a Ukrainian tugboat.The Russians immediately gleefully called “bullshit,” noting that Trump’s decision was much more likely caused by Trump’s domestic problems. But hey, at least they didn’t rub in the fact that they were the cause of those domestic problems.
I was gratified to see that, as usual, the media pundits had their heads safely up their collective ass. Everybody was somberly opining that the reason that His Lowness cancelled the meeting with Putin was to avoid having to answer questions about Michael Cohen at the post powwow press conference. This is ridiculous, he already answered questions about Cohen before he got on Trump Force 1. His answer was basically, “So what?” What?” Trump couldn’t afford was having Putin standing at a podium answering questions about Michael Cohen. Look what happened in Helsinki. A reporter asked Putin if he did actually order his GRU to interfere in our election, and did they do so, and Putin answered “Yes, and yes.” Right now, Cohen’s accusations are publicly uncorroborated, the last thing Trump needs is his co-conspirator spilling the beans to the press.
Putin is about to learn what everybody else already knows, namely, that Trump is your best friend until he’s not. Other foreign leaders already know this. When Justin Trudeau was staring adoringly at Trump like a kid watching his Dad show him how to change spark plugs, he was aces. But respond to Trump’s tariffs in kind, and suddenly he’s weak. Likewise with Macron, when he was busy showing off his war toys to Glorious Bleater, Macron was golden. But tell Trump that only idiots withdraw within their own borders, and suddenly it’s time for somebody else to “Make France Great Again!”Trumps problem is simple, the little light has finally gone on when the fridge door was opened. Cohen has finally shown a direct relationship between Trump and the Russian government, while he was running for President. Somebody finally took the plate with his bacon double cheeseburger away from him until he got it through his thick skull that doing everything but flush after he wiped Putin’s ass was making him look like a whiny little sycophant. He was going to have to put his big boy pants on and try to look tough when it came to Vladimir Putin.
This is a ill planned course of action, for two reasons. First, it’s much too late. Trump has been slobbering all over Putin’s face like your dog when you get home from a business trip for too damn long now. Nobody is going to believe a word out of his mouth, especially when he fails to follow up all of that tough talk with any concrete action.
Second, Putin has the goods, and Trump knows it. Forget about the “pee tape” for a minute, that’s just one more disgusting personal foible in Trump’s bottomless supply. What happens if Wikileaks suddenly starts dropping audio tapes of Cohen, or Manafort, or Stone or Corsi or Sater, specifically talking about stolen e-mails, and what to drop when. What is Wikileaks starts dropping receipts of stolen e-mails from Guccifer 2.0, with corroborating communications from Trump connected cronies?The wellspring of incriminating dirt that Putin can dump over Trump’s head is almost infinite. Hey, you lay down with wolves, you wake up with teeth marks.
So, all indications are that we are about to have a very public, screeching cat fight. Which is likely to be both very entertaining, as well as very short lived. Because, the way I see it, one of the fighters is going in declawed. And with Trump being preoccupied with both Cohen as well as Putin, not to even mention the Democratic committees in January, it looks like Paul Manafort is gonna spend a lot of birthdays in the slammer waiting for that pardon to come through. Ain’t payback beautiful?
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