GOP senator, who recently met with Russia’s leader, warns of ‘denial, hostility, blaming others’
“If our experience is any indication of what the president will find, it will be denial, hostility, blaming others and long and tedious responses,” the Kansas Republican said in an interview as he was returning home... Moreover, Sen. Moran suggests the president might want to think twice about his plan to meet privately with Mr. Putin, with no aides present. The senator and his colleagues are fuming at the way the Russian media portrayed (or, they say, baldly mis-portrayed) their own private meetings with Russian officials, suggesting the Americans only briefly and meekly raised the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign... Trump, understandably, has focused instead on what he sees as the upside potential. In general, he thinks the world is a safer place if the U.S. and Russia get along. More specifically, he wants Russia to help in the effort to force North Korea to denuclearize by not providing backdoor economic relief to the regime in Pyongyang, particularly by buying North Korean coal... Russia may use the very fact of a private meeting with the president to claim the U.S. has accepted Russia’s annexation of Crimea and acknowledged its right to interfere in Ukraine. Russian media already have trumpeted statements by Mr. Trump suggesting sympathy for the Russian position on Crimea as proof the Americans have thrown in the towel on the subject.Moreover, Mr. Putin may well use Mr. Trump’s own apparent ambivalence about the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to portray the U.S. and Russia as moving beyond the traditional alliance that has guarded Western security through the post-World War II era... Mr. Trump and his aides are playing a good-cop, bad-cop routine, in which Mr. Trump questions the motives of America’s allies and carries on pointed spats with the leaders of France, Germay and Canada, while his aides praise the allies and their efforts. In a briefing for reporters last week, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to NATO, lauded what she called “the biggest increase in defense spending by our allies since the Cold War.”.. Finally, Mr. Putin doubtless will continue to simply deny any interference in the 2016 election campaign, a denial that Mr. Trump noted again on Twitter last week: “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!”The risk is that the Russian leader will use Mr. Trump’s seeming willingness to accept his denials as proof that any claims to the contrary—including a seven-page bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee last week—are specious.Mr. Trump’s critics already portray him as way too cozy with his Russian counterpart. Unless Mr. Trump plays the summit well, he could allow the meeting to play directly into that critique.