Trump the Appeaser

by Deacon Blues

If the GOP establishment came out of their convention last week hoping Donald Trump would become an adult general election candidate, and no longer act like an unstable reality TV show host, their hopes have been dashed with the news today that Trump actively encourages Russia to help him get elected president by committing espionage against the United States.

To make things worse, Trump also showed his appeasement streak by openly siding with Putin’s military annexation of Crimea in 2014. And his ties to Putin and Russia are not only recent events; they’ve been ongoing. Trump would be Putin’s man in the Oval Office.

When an American presidential candidate openly asks for assistance from a foreign, nuclear-armed enemy of the United States, and that same candidate is already compromised by his ties to unaccountable oligarchs who want to control the federal government for their personal benefit, I think the Democrats have what they need to go after Trump in the white working class areas of rural Ohio and Pennsylvania. Simply put, the message is “Do you hate your country enough to turn it over to Vladimir Putin and the Koch Brothers?”

I know if a Democrat made these statements and demonstrated these preferences, he or she would be called an appeaser and perhaps even a traitor by the GOP elite and right wing media. Democrats need to make Donald Trump too toxic for Republicans to support.

Update, Wednesday evening: After watching Bernie Sanders's supporters jeer and shout down former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta while he was trying to point out the national security dangers of a Trump presidency, I can only conclude that those supporters actively want a Trump presidency. What these supporters did tonight was not only reprehensible, but worse yet, exactly what Trump would have wanted, as his agents.