We Had Brunch With A Couple Of Trump Supporter Friends Of Ours, And Checked In With Some Others…
And while none of them (to varying degrees) like how the President is cozying up to Putin, they all steered the conversation to the same conclusion: “but it’s better than nuclear war.”
And interestingly, 100% of the email and other feedback we received both here and other places we publish, in response to our criticism of Trump’s performance after his meeting with Putin all lands in that very same place. “What’s so bad about decreasing the chances of an extinction event nuclear war?”, wrote one of our readers.
No surprise Trump is promoting the same idea himself:
And that’s not the only one. There are other, similar Tweets.
As if these are the only two possible outcomes:
- Friends with Putin.
- Nuclear war.
And nothing in between.
How are all these people forgetting a little thing called the Cold War, where Russia was a constant huge existential nuclear threat for decades. And the U.S. never backed down. And guess what? No nuclear war! How is that even possible?
Should President Kennedy have said “I want to be friends with Khrushchev so let’s go ahead and allow him to put missiles in Cuba because It’s better than nuclear war?” Did whole swathes of Americans feel that way during the Cuban Missile Crisis? No! So why are people bending so far backward or leaning so far forward right now?
“Friends with Putin”: fine. Go ahead and be friends with a dictator, an invader, an avowed foe of Western Democracies, and a murderer. We don’t agree, but can accept a doctrine that allows for talking to all comers.
But that doesn’t then require you to appear subservient: to bash your own intelligence apparatus, and your predecessors, and by extension the American public who elected them, by saying your own people are “foolish” and “stupid” right in front of the guy.
And then you go on CNBC and say:
“I mean I had these — some of these fools from the media saying, “Why didn’t you stand there, look him in the face, walk over to him, and start shouting at him?” I said, “Are these people crazy? I want to make a deal.”
Well, yeah. You just did exactly that to America’s closest allies at the G-7 and NATO summits. In fact, in those cases you told us that’s precisely how you do make a deal. So why not?
But while we’re clearly not past all this (after all, it was less than a week ago), our Trump-supporting friends are. And that’s something they also like. In fact, that’s one more reason they give for continuing to support Trump: that Liberals are still steamed by the Russia thing a week later, while they’re long over it. “We don’t like the guy either”, one of them said (although we think they actually do), “but put that up against all the money he’s bringing in, all the jobs he’s creating, and it’s really hard for us to keep caring about Russia.” (Except for the first part, that’s a paraphrase of what several Trump supporters told us, posted, or Tweeted).
In less time than it took them to get past “grab ’em by the pussy“. Because it’s better than nuclear war.
Of course, then we wake up to this:
At least Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons (partly thanks to Obama and our allies in Europe as well as Israel). But wonder what our pro-Trump friends will say about that..
