Photo via President of Russia - kremlin.ru
Putin in meeting
Putin meeting with the Russian Head of the Federal Agency for Fishery Ilya Shestakov
This is the third U.S. presidential election in a row Vladimir Putin’s Russian intelligence agents will be running a covert operation to subvert American democracy by supporting Donald Trump’s Republican candidacy for president.
The biggest difference this time is for the first time in American history elected Republicans are returning the favor. They openly support Trump’s public threat to withdraw U.S. protection of democracy in Europe to allow Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to destroy Ukraine and any other European democracy that offends Trump.
Moments into President Biden’s fiery State of the Union address, Biden put the issue directly to Republicans whether they would defend freedom and democracy in America and around the world. “I say this to Congress: We have to stand up to Putin,” Biden said. “In a literal sense, history is watching. Just like history watched three years ago on January 6 when insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger to the throat of American democracy.”
Not only was history watching, but so were millions of television viewers. And what all those Americans saw when Biden asked Republicans to stand up to Putin against the destruction of freedom and democracy was House Speaker Mike Johnson sitting behind Biden and other grim-faced Republicans refusing to join the standing ovation.
Biden is in Touch
For Americans just tuning into the presidential race, Biden’s fighting speech opposing the assault on our democracy from Trump and Putin blew away all of Trump’s lies that Biden is the aging 2024 presidential candidate who is somehow out of touch with America.
It's been shocking how quickly rightwing Republicans who’d pretended to be the most anti-communist, Russian-hating politicians on the planet for decades did an immediate about-face to embrace Putin as Trump’s best pal after 2016. All it took was a clandestine internet campaign by Putin’s Russian trolls spreading millions of lies about Hillary Clinton helping to elect President Trump as Putin’s real-life Manchurian candidate.
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Putin himself must have been surprised by how easy it was to convert Trump and other rightwing Republicans like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson into useful idiots spreading pro-Russian propaganda. House Republicans Jim Jordan and James Comer even used the lies of a Russian intelligence agent to bring impeachment charges against Biden.
But there’s no evidence at all that an overwhelming majority of American voters are nearly as eager as Trump and his hard-core true believers in the Republican party to support Putin’s destruction of democracy in their own country and around the world. Most Americans – Republican, Democratic or independent – want to believe all those political speeches on the Fourth of July about the greatness of American democracy.
Trump Admires Putin
Trump has never supported U.S. elections unless they come out the way he wants them to. That’s why Trump admires Putin. In Russia, elections always come out Putin’s way. But it got a lot harder for Trump to sell the Putin plan to Americans after Putin murdered his leading political opponent Alexei Navalny.
Trump’s attorneys made fools of themselves arguing before the Supreme Court that Trump should be immune from criminal prosecution for murdering his own political opponents. The Supreme Court is delaying its decision, but no one seriously expects the court to legalize political assassinations.
Presidential elections are usually determined by what is happening in voters’ lives rather than world events. That’s why it’s important President Biden has succeeded in making the protection of democracy a personal issue for every American voter. Democracy isn’t only being destroyed by Putin reducing much of Ukraine to rubble. Trump’s failed insurrection attempted to overthrow democracy after his defeat. He also damaged our democracy by leaving behind a Supreme Court that rolled back 50 years of equal rights for women to make decisions about their own lives.
“Clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women,” Biden said. “But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot. We won in 2022 and 2023 and we will win again in 2024.”
Republicans appear more worried about losing the votes of Trump’s violent insurrectionists than they are of losing the votes of patriotic Americans who support democracy. Since the presidential rematch between Biden and Trump got fully underway following Biden’s rousing State of the Union address, the campaign is finally focusing on the real issues in the election.
The fact that Biden and Trump are the oldest candidates ever to run for president is not a real issue. There’s nothing either candidate can do about how old they are. Beyond being two aging, white males, it would be difficult to imagine two candidates with more starkly different visions for the future of America. If democracy can maintain its steady winning streak in every election since 2018, surely this will be the last presidential election Putin has a candidate in the race.
