President Donald Trump appeared to equate US actions with the authoritarian regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview [with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News] released Saturday, saying, ‘There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?’
(CNN, February 6, 2017)
Unsurprisingly, CNN commentators led near-universal condemnation of Trump for what they deem was the moral equivalence he drew between Putin and US presidents.
Except that, in trying to defend American exceptionalism in this context, these commentators willfully ignored the fact that US presidents have
- committed genocide against Native Americans;
- owned slaves and lorded over the institution of slavery;
- rigged elections;
- ordered assassinations of foreign leaders;
- conducted misguided/illegal wars that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children;
- had bromances with brutal, misogynistic, jihadi-funding dictators that make Trump’s bromance with Putin look like a teenage crush.
I could name many more of their exceptional sins, but you get the point.
No doubt Putin is a murderous thug. But there’s no denying that his misdeeds are of a choirboy variety compared with those of far too many US presidents.
Yet I hasten to make clear my suspicion that Trump’s he-who-is-without-sin quip about US presidents has nothing to do with drawing moral equivalence. Instead, like his troubling refusal to utter a critical word about Putin, I suspect it has everything to do with protecting compromising, perhaps even incriminating, information this former spymaster has on him.
I’m on record delineating this suspicion in commentaries like “The Issue Is Not Whether Russia Affected Outcome of US Election…,” December 12, 2016, and “US Intel Says Putin Has Compromising Info on Trump,” January 10, 2017.
Related commentaries:
The Issue…
Trump on Putin…
US Intel…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Monday, at 9:43 a.m.