In Helsinki, Trump flattens in front of Putin

Donald Trump is strongly criticized in his country after the Helsinki summit, where Putin drank whey.
  

For Vladimir Putin, the match was won in advance. The mere fact of appearing on an equal footing with the President of the United States, during his summit meeting with Donald Trump on Monday, July 16 in Helsinki (Finland), would allow the Kremlin master, who came to power in 2000, to badert its status as a leader of a superpower to found greatness.

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But the Russian president has done even better. At the press conference closing his tete-a-tete with Trump, he dominated his counterpart whose naivety or weakness came to light when he was pressed by American journalists.

"There are two versions of this story"

Asked who, US intelligence or Vladimir Putin, was right in the Russian interferences case during the 2016 US election, the tenant of the White House blandly explained that he had no reason not to trust the master of the Kremlin: "President Putin has just told me that Russia has nothing to do with it, and I would add this: I do not see why it would be Russia. "

"There are two versions of this story …", still eluded the American president. An awkward equivalence reminiscent of the one he made last summer after the Charlottesville, Virginia, protests. He then said that there were "good people on both sides", sending back-to-back neo-Nazi militants and counter-demonstrators … Thus, for the American president, the word of the FBI does not weigh more than the badertions of the president of a rival country.

"I think that the United States was inconsistent"

Before Vladimir Putin, the US president went so far as to condemn the ongoing investigation of the US Department of Justice on the alleged links of his team of campaign with Russia. "A disaster for the country," he said of the ongoing investigation of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.

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Above all, Trump tried to discredit the institutions of his own country, suggesting that the FBI was deliberately distorting his investigation of the Russian hacking of the computer server of the Democratic Party during the 2016 campaign.

About the bad relations between the two countries, Trump said: "I hold our two countries responsible, I think that the United States has been inconsistent. We should have started talking a long time ago, frankly, well before my election. "

Multiplying criticisms of the functioning of certain American institutions, Donald Trump did not, however, say a word about the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the Russian intervention in Eastern Ukraine , the war in Syria, or the Novitchock nerve poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the UK last March.

It is true that Donald Trump's posture is not new. He has repeatedly criticized the FBI in recent months. The novelty, spectacular, is that he denigrates the institutions and intelligence services of his own country while he is abroad, which is more with Vladimir Putin.

"The Helsinki Summit is a tragic mistake"

The President thus attracts blistering critics even to his own side. The Democratic opposition leader in the US Senate, Chuck Schumer (State of New York) accuses the US president of being "thoughtless, dangerous and weak" against Vladimir Putin.

"The White House is now confronted with a single grim question: what can push Donald Trump to put Russia's interests above those of the United States?" wrote Chuck Schumer on Twitter. "Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous behavior is the possibility that President Putin has harmful information about President Trump (…) In the history of our country, Americans had never seen a president of the United States support an opponent of America as Donald Trump just backed President Putin. "

For Republican Senator John McCain (Arizona), who regularly disagrees with the president, the joint press conference of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will remain "one of the worst moments in the history of the US presidency. It is clear that the Helsinki summit is a tragic mistake. "

The conservative daily Wall Street Journal is of the opinion that Donald Trump's "readiness" with the Russian president is "a national embarrbadment". In an editorial, the New York newspaper accuses Trump of weakening the United States.

Congressman Paul Ryan calls Donald Trump "to understand that Russia is not our ally". And to recall that "there is no morally equivalence between the United States and Russia, [un pays] which remains hostile to our ideals and our fundamental values".