{"id":5973,"date":"2017-11-11T17:10:43","date_gmt":"2017-11-11T16:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5973"},"modified":"2017-11-11T17:14:02","modified_gmt":"2017-11-11T16:14:02","slug":"why-trump-is-fond-of-putin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/5973\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Trump is fond of Putin"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is hardly surprising<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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President Vladimir Putin feels insulted by allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, Donald Trump has said after meeting him briefly at an Asia-Pacific summit in Vietnam.<\/p>\n

“You can only ask so many times… he said he absolutely did not meddle in our election,” the US president said.<\/p>\n

Mr Putin later dismissed the allegations as “political infighting”.<\/p>\n

The US intelligence community has already concluded that Russia tried to sway the poll in favour of Mr Trump.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

President Trump has refused to acknowledge\u00a0a reported assessment by the CIA and other intelligence agencies that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the run-up to last year’s presidential election.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You don’t actually need to trust Putin an inch to believe he is telling the truth that he didn’t try to swing the outcome of the US election. None of this passed the smell test from the beginning, and the whole think reeked of an effort to explain Hillary’s catastrophic loss and an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency. I always suspected Putin found all of these accusations highly amusing; other than the usual shit-stirring that Russia’s spy agencies have been involved in since the Soviet times, exploiting divisions in US society to sow chaos as part of their zero-sum rivalry with America, I very much doubt Russia had any involvement in the US election. For one thing, it’s never been explained why Putin would have preferred Trump to Clinton.<\/p>\n

Of course, those who don’t want very much to change in US politics are aghast at this:<\/p>\n

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Just when I think my capacity to be surprised has been exhausted, Pres Trump declares that he accepts Putin’s word (over CIA’s) that he never interfered in our election & worries the Russian leader feels insulted by charge to contrary<\/p>\n

\u2014 Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) November 11, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n