What the hell is going on in the Republican Party?
Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now: why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation?
Yesterday Donald Trump told reporters he’s ready to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen next month — apparently, a modern-day Yalta conference to carve up the world — and that Ukraine’s president may not be invited to the meeting that will decide Ukraine’s fate.
That came just three days after he spit on the grave of Lindsey Graham by signing an executive order waiving every operative section of the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act that both houses of Congress had passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.
Gone are the 500 percent tariffs on Russian goods, the secondary sanctions on Putin’s oil customers, and the requirement that the sanctions stay in place until Russia made peace on terms Ukraine accepted. All destroyed on a Friday night while Congress was out of town. And now he’s publicly, shamelessly defending it and essentially daring Republicans in Congress to do anything about it.
This all came a week after one of Trump’s roughly every-two-weeks-since-he-was-sworn-in phone calls with Putin, presumably to get his instructions on how to destroy American democracy, gut our government, and hand Europe over to the revived USSR that Putin fantasizes about.
Putin apparently ordered Trump to end diesel sanctions and thus send him billions of dollars to build more drones and glide bombs to kill more Ukrainian children, and Trump said, “Sir, yes sir!”
The Wall Street Journal noted that the same call was where Putin suggested the meeting with Trump and Xi and that a former Russian intelligence officer described it to the paper as a “new Yalta,” three strongmen dividing the planet into spheres of influence.
While Democrats and average Americans are furious, a tiny handful of Republicans have timidly objected.