March 20, 2018 01:20 PM UTC

Trump Praises Putin's Fraudulent Re-Election

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

AP’s Vladimir Isachenkov via the Denver Post, hooray comrade!

U.S. President Donald Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin Tuesday to congratulate him on his re-election, the Kremlin said.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that Trump spoke with Putin Tuesday morning. She said a summary of the call would be released later…

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that the two leaders didn’t discuss the poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal in Britain. British officials have blamed the nerve agent attack on Skripal and his adult daughter on Russia. Russia has denied the accusations.

As if they were going to talk about anything heavy? That’s not the kind of discussions President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have. It’s more like pillow talk. Which Sen. John McCain (R) astutely points out is…the problem:

An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections. And by doing so with Vladimir Putin, President Trump insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election. https://t.co/lcQTBi7CA1

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) March 20, 2018

And to be clear, this is the “victory” Trump was congratulating, strikingly similar–and with factual basis–to the baseless claims of election fraud Trump concocted to explain his popular vote loss in 2016:

Russian election observers denounced what they said were large-scale violations in the presidential vote that handed Vladimir Putin a crushing victory, including ballot-stuffing that was captured on state-controlled cameras.

Golos, an election-monitoring organization, said it registered more than 1,500 violations in regions across Russia. Several cases of people stuffing ballot boxes at polling stations, including near Moscow, were recorded on cameras set up by the authorities to ensure a transparent vote.

But McCain seems to forget: Trump would like to be Presidente por Vida himself.