House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) slammed Trump on CNN for refusing to stand up to Putin while he bullies the media.
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Rep. Smith said:
This sends a very bad signal. Putin takes advantage of weakness, and it’s very ironic for someone with as much bluster as Donald Trump throws around every day—I guess I wish he treated Vladimir Putin more like he treats CNN. I wish he was more willing to stand up to a world leader who is threatening democracy and undermining countries all across the globe.
Because it’s not just the U.S. elections that the Russians have hacked into and influenced and manipulated. They’ve been doing it for quite some time. They run disinformation campaigns. They use very low-cost options: cyberattacks, disinformation. They don’t have a very strong military. But what they do have is they’ve decided to use these lower-cost technology options to influence things. And it’s very clear what Putin is trying to do. He’s trying to make the world safe for autocratic dictatorships. That’s what he believes in and that’s what he wants to keep in Russia, and that’s what he wants to spread. He wants to undermine liberal democracy any place he can.
The only realistic option for us is to counter that. To the extent that we let Putin get away with it, he’s going to keep doing it. It’s just like in Ukraine. We have not given Ukraine the level of support that we should have to raise the cost for Putin’s interference there. We need to up our efforts to counter their counterinformation campaigns. We need to be very clear: What Putin is doing is unacceptable. It borders on an act of war, the way they’ve been treating us. And to offer concessions is simply going to encourage him to continue. We need to push back.
Push back is the last thing that Russia is going to get from Donald Trump. Rep. Smith was correct. If Trump treated the true enemies of America, like Putin, the same way that he treats the free press, he wouldn’t be such a laughingstock, and the US wouldn’t be declining in influence by the minute. The country needs real leadership out of their president, and the one thing that is obvious with each passing day is that Trump is not a real leader who is willing to do the work necessary to effectively govern.
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