You can acknowledge that President Trump gave an embarrassingly weak performance at the press conference following his face-to-face meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, while rejecting the media’s weird preoccupation that Trump didn’t publicly insult Putin to his face.
In 2018, every day goes down as a bad day if Trump didn’t use it to condemn Russia for interfering with the 2016 election.
If you didn’t watch the conference live on Monday and instead only saw the media’s coverage of it, you’re forgiven for maybe falling under the impression that Trump disowned the U.S. intelligence community and pledged allegiance to Putin.
“Trump sides with Putin over US intelligence,” said a headline at CNN’s website.
Politico declared that Trump “publicly sides with Putin on election interference.”
What Trump actually did was give a typical noncommittal response to an issue he hates talking about: His win, and whether an outside influence had anything to do with it.
“So, I have great confidence in my intelligence people,” he said. “But I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
Trump also said he didn’t “see any reason why it would” have been Russia, though the next day he said he had meant to say “wouldn’t” have been Russia.
Asked whether there was anything he wanted to fault Russia for in sour relations with the U.S., Trump said, “I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish.”
[Related: ‘Shameful’: Senate Republicans blast Trump after he blamed US for soured Russian relationship]
None of this is any different than anything Trump has said since his inauguration. His skepticism of the intelligence community is well known. His stated belief that the U.S. should have better relations with Russia, and that the Obama administration deserves blame for much of it, is on the record. And his reflexively defensive posture against the slightest suggestion that he didn’t fairly win the one campaign he has ever done has been demonstrated over and over and over.
That Trump was supposed to say something different because he was in front of Putin (who he had just had two hours-worth of negotiations with) and it would have been a good show for the media is absurd.
But immediately after the conference, CNN’s supposedly objective Anderson Cooper greeted viewers by calling it “perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president” that he had “ever seen.” (Mind you, having been spanked on stage by Madonna, those are searing words from Cooper about any “performance.”)
Because Trump didn’t say the complete opposite of what he’s been saying for at least a year and a half, the media want everyone to be offended.
Several Republicans followed suit by saying Trump should have rebuked Putin to his face, but that’s been the standard GOP position for exactly 1 billion years, so there’s another nonevent. Trump, by comparison, openly stated at his campaign events that he believed he would personally “get along” with Putin.
On Wednesday, though, NBC reporter Hallie Jackson was still asking White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to name one time Trump had “publicly called out” Putin.
The president was awkward next to Putin. But contrary to what the media say, the success of the meeting didn’t hinge on Trump declining to follow hours of global affairs talks by smacking Putin on the forehead.
