Trump’s Tainted Helsinki Talks With Putin
By insulting allies and acting as a Kremlin apologist, the president has done nothing to assuage suspicion over his motives.
He gets more courtesy than Merkel or May.
Photographer: Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images
When President Donald Trump meets with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki today he already will have given Russia’s leader a gift that eluded Putin’s predecessors throughout the Cold War’s long and perilous decades: bragging rights for having helped separate the U.S. from its Western European allies.
Trump — who began his recent European diplomatic tour by attacking Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, before repeatedly undermining and insulting the U.K.’s Prime Minister, Theresa May — told CBS’s Jeff Glor over the weekend that he considered the European Union to be America’s “foe.” He described Russia and China as foes in the same interview, too, but that was something of an afterthought. When asked to identify his “biggest foe globally right now,” his first response was the EU.