The claim from former President Trump attorney Michael Cohen as part of his plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller that negotiations over a possible Trump Tower in Moscow continued through the 2016 Republican primaries have triggered a renewed look at Trump’s laudatory statements about Russian leader Vladamir Putin during the campaign.
Over at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent has rounded up a series of statements Trump made in the early months of 2016 praising or defending Putin, the period during which Cohen has now said negotiations with Putin’s Russian intermediaries were ongoing.
Is this an example, then, of Trump’s stances toward Russia being influenced by his business interests?
Perhaps it is, but to me, Trump’s statements about other tyrants suggest he has a more general and long-standing admiration of authoritarian rulers, whom he sees as strong in consolidating power and unwavering in their pursuit of their nations’ interests.
In 1990, for instance, in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, Trump told Playboy, “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
In a 2016 Republican primary debate, Trump insisted he was not endorsing the behavior of the Chinese government, yet added, “I said that is a strong, powerful government that put it down with strength. And then they kept down the riot.”
As president, he has also praised the strength of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, saying, “He is very talented. Anybody that takes over a situation like he did, at 26 years of age, and is able to run it, and run it tough — I don’t say he was nice or I don’t say anything about it — he ran it.”
Fox News’ Bret Baier asked him about human rights, noting that Kim is a “killer” who is “clearly executing people.” Trump’s response was to say, “He’s a tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, tough people, and you take it over from your father … if you could do that at 27-years old, I mean, that’s 1 in 10,000 that could do that.”
When Baier pressed that “he’s still done some really bad things,” Trump responded, “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I mean I can go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”
All of this style of talk is consistent with how Trump views power, which is that strong rulers do what they need to do, while weak ones equivocate. Throughout his time in office, Trump has seemed frustrated by the limitations on presidential power in the United States, almost envious of what other leaders can get away with. Though his flirtations with authoritarianism have been more rhetoric than reality, his talk of revoking press credentials and revisiting libel laws or jokes about becoming president for life are all consistent with this.
So, to me, all of his defenses of Putin would fit in with this general outlook. Nobody is suggesting he has business interests in North Korea, after all.
Now, as for the broader issue raised by Cohen’s statements and related documents: If true that Trump was continuing to have some business talks with Russia during the primaries, it’s hard to see how that would be illegal given that he was a private citizen at the time rather than a government official. It’s certainly unethical and inappropriate for a presidential candidate to be seeking business opportunities while running for the higher office of the land given the potential for conflicts of interest. But at the root of it, the biggest issue is the lack of transparency.
Though Trump was the front-runner, his nomination was very much in flux in the early months of 2016 — Sen. Ted Cruz won Iowa, after all. Now, it’s possible that even if more were known about his business dealings with Russia at the time, it wouldn’t have changed the trajectory of the race. Knowing what we know now, it likely would have been yet another issue that “Never Trumpers” got up in arms about but that had no resonance with actual voters who were driven to Trump for other reasons. But at least they would have been making their decisions with full access to relevant information about his business dealings with a foreign adversary.
