In case you missed it, President Trump tweeted the following earlier this week:
“I’m very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election. Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don’t want Trump!”
What precipitated this note was an observation a good friend made in an email about the President’s tweet: “ … IF the Dems win big in the mid-terms, [President Trump and the Republicans] will challenge the results and want special investigations, or at the very least, spread discord that the midterms were affected by the Russians … Either way [i.e., whether the Democrats or Republicans do better in the midterms], Putin wins .…”
Putting aside for just this one post whether or not it is in our best interest for the President to have adopted the attitude toward Russia and President Putin that he has, any citizen with any power of discernment undoubtedly recognizes that his approach has been one of conciliation – bordering on if not constituting obsequiousness. Mr. Putin himself said last week that he wanted Mr. Trump to win in 2016. The body language between the two men at the Helsinki news conference could not have been more fraternal. Even a number of Republicans that hadn’t previously had the courage to speak out against other Administration policies voiced criticism of Mr. Trump’s Helsinki performance.
Although I have grave concern that our friend is correct about the ultimate effect of the President’s latest stratagem, even the most ardent of his supporters should be offended by this tweet. Given the intelligence community’s unanimous assessment that Russia did interfere in our election processes in support of Mr. Trump, for the President to assert that Russia didn’t do that (which he has done repeatedly since taking office, and did again in a tweet this week) while at the same time claiming (1) that no President has been tougher on Russia than him (contra, at least: H. Truman; D. Eisenhower; J. Kennedy; R. Nixon; and – far from least – R. Reagan) and (2) that Russians will favor Democrats in the midterms so strains credulity that it seems … that the President must believe that his followers have super stretching and swallowing powers.
In that spirit, I took a minute to look for those that might have the capacity to accept the President’s claim. Below is a link to the site, “Category: Fictional Characters Who Can Stretch Themselves.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_characters_who_can_stretch_themselves
The only character I could locate with super swallowing powers was Vice President Pence.
President Trump and the Russians, whether through coherence or by coincidence, have regularly sought to undermine our citizens’ belief in our institutions and electoral processes. I hold out the hope that few of our citizens, no matter how substantively conservative, can either stretch or swallow enough to credit Mr. Trump’s latest bull … oney …
McCoy's Noise 