President Trump has changed his mind on many issues. Yet there is one theme of his presidency that remains strikingly constant: his peculiar deference to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. We witnessed it again in Trump’s new interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios, when he once again refused to criticize the Russian president for allegedly offering Taliban fighters bounties in return for killing U.S. soldiers, and also excused Russian arming of the Taliban by arguing, “Well, we sold them weapons when they were fighting Russia, too. The Taliban, in Afghanistan. … I’m just saying, we did that, too.” (Note: The Taliban, which was formed in 1994, never fought Soviet forces, which left the country five years earlier.) We already knew that Trump had avoided raising the issue in a series of phone calls with Putin in the past few months.
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(L to R) Russia's President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump, Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, Brazil's President Michel Temer and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman line up for a family photo, during the G20 Leaders' Summit in Buenos Aires, on Nov. 30, 2018.
