An asset?
by digby
He is. The only question is whether he's a witting or unwitting one.
I vote for witting. Aside from the fact that he was negotiating a deal for a Trump Tower Moscow during the campaign and lied about it for years, there are a number of weird things he said at important moments. For instance, two days before the Trump Tower meeting he said this:
“I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”
They didn't turn over the information at the meeting, which he clearly expected, so the big speech didn't happen.
And then there's this one, newly revealed in the latest Manafort stuff. In early August, Manafort, Gates and former FSB agent Kilimnik met clandestinely in New York, we now know to turn over valuable polling information and discuss the "Ukraine peace plan." Right around that time, Trump was saying some really bizarre stuff:
"But you know, the people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were. And you have to look at that, also."
The move would be a reversal of the Obama administration's policy of refusing to recognize Russia's occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014.
"Just so you understand. [Putin is] not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down and you can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want," before admitting, after prodding by the program's host, that, "OK, well, he’s there in a certain way, but I’m not there yet," an apparent reference to the U.S. presidency.
We don't know who was "advising" him about all this at the time but it was way out of the foreign policy mainstream to put it that way. It was, as Clinton put it in the debate< "the Putin line." We know that Trump had not come to any of this by himself because he made it clear that he didn't even know that Russia had invaded. Someone fed him this and we still don't know who.
More recently he's been spouting the Putin line about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan being a righteous response to terrorism which is a view of history only proposed by Russian propaganda.
It's possible that he just genuinely believes whoever is feeding him these ideas just has America's best interest at heart. But it's reasonable to suspect that even he isn't quite that stupid.
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