what many grass-roots American conservatives heard was not a brash provocation, but a brave and unequivocal calling out of a bully.
.. “I believe that this idiot over there is trying to make a name for himself,” said Mr. Yu’s friend Ralph Barbee Jr., 76, a Vietnam veteran and former host of a local fishing show who arrived at the Golden Corral in an S.U.V. adorned with stars, stripes and an enormous photo of Mr. Trump on the hood. “I believe if he fires one more missile, that’s the end for them.”
.. On Thursday, the conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh praised President Trump on his radio show for his display of machismo, contrasting him with his predecessor, Barack Obama.
“We don’t have a pajama boy who wears mom jeans who can barely throw a baseball, a first pitch, at a Nationals game, as president,” he said. “We have somebody out there who’s no-nonsense, and who’s not going to take this.”
.. “He needs to step all over that little twerp,” said John Stout, 71, who sat with three retired friends over coffee at the Sinclair gas station in Wiggins, Colo., on Thursday. The other men nodded in agreement. “If it had been me up there,” Mr. Stout continued, “I’d have done it a lot quicker.”
.. “Hell yes,” he said. “And they can pinpoint it to where they are not killing a lot of innocent people. That will be the big goal there.”
.. She said that Mr. Trump’s stance on North Korea is exactly what she was hoping for. “I think we have to go guns blazing and let them have it,” she said.
.. “I think he needs to send some SEALs in to take care of him. As a private matter. I think he needs to go after that guy, and nobody will know about it.” She trusts the president, she said. “Trump, he knows very well how to play his cards right.”
.. Austin Rhodes, 52, a conservative. Mr. Rhodes said that the president had limited oratorical skills, and compared him to the rock singer Meat Loaf: “No matter what he sings, whether he tries to sing a Meat Loaf hit or opera, he’s going to be Meat Loaf.”
But in this case, he said, perhaps Trumpian bluster was exactly what was needed in response to North Korea as well as a number of troubled Middle Eastern countries, Mr. Rhodes said. “You need to be ridiculously blunt. Maybe this is the guy for the times, because Obama was not.”
.. In an opening prayer, a woman asked God to help make America great again.
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Reverence for Putin on the Right Buys Trump Cover
“Putin decides what he wants to do, and he does it in half a day,” Rudolph W. Giuliani
.. Mr. Putin was worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, K. T. McFarland said in 2013, before going on to serve a brief and ill-fated stint as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser.
.. “A great leader,” “very reasoned,” and “extremely diplomatic,” was how Mr. Trump himself described Mr. Putin that same year.
.. Mr. Putin is no arch-villain in this understanding of America-Russian relations. Rather, he personifies many of the qualities and attitudes that conservatives have desired in a president: a respect for traditional Christian values, a swelling nationalist pride and an aggressive posture toward foreign adversaries.
In this view, the Russian president is a brilliant tactician, a slayer of murderous Islamic extremists — and not incidentally, a leader who outmaneuvered and emasculated President Barack Obama on the world stage. And because of that, almost any other transgression seems forgivable.
“There are conservatives here who maybe read into Russia things they wish were true in the United States,” .. “And they imagine Russia and Putin as the kind of strong, traditional conservative leader whom they wish they had in the United States.” To these conservatives, she added, “Russia is the true defender of Christian values. We are decadent.”
.. Mr. Trump’s opponents have tried repeatedly to make an issue of the mutual admiration between him and the Russian president, anticipating that Republicans would not tolerate any whiff of sympathy from one of their own toward the leader of what Ronald Reagan called the “evil empire.”
.. “My guess is that Trump voters would say: ‘Hey, you know what? I kind of like the fact that Putin’s endorsed Trump,’ ” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in December 2015. “At least Putin’s killing terrorists. At least Putin’s made an enemy out of ISIS. We don’t seem to be able to do that.”
.. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Fox News host who once said Mr. Trump had considered naming her as his press secretary, said that she wished Mr. Putin could be president of the United States for just 48 hours. That way, as she put it, “Americans don’t have to worry and wake up in the morning fearful of a group that’s murderous and horrific like ISIS.”
.. many conservatives now, ironically, echo Mr. Obama, who in 2012 brushed off the warnings of Mitt Romney, his Republican opponent, that Russia was the United States’ “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”
.. “It’s like being raised in a church and someone says, ‘Actually, no, you’re a Buddhist,’ ”
.. The unflattering comparisons with Mr. Obama became personal in 2014 after Mr. Putin invaded Crimea, an act of aggression that was widely condemned by the United States and its allies but praised as a display of brawn and guts by many on the right.
Sarah Palin, for one, questioned Mr. Obama’s “potency” and added that no one had any such doubts about Mr. Putin. “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil,” she told Sean Hannity on Fox News.
.. “He’s looking like a real man,” Mr. Limbaugh declared approvingly in 2014.
.. Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, which has tracked the conservative media’s depiction of the Russian president, described Mr. Putin as taking on “a Paul Bunyan-esque persona among this audience.”
.. Mr. Putin’s mystique for conservatives resembles in many ways the image that Mr. Trump has cultivated for himself.
.. Both are go-it-alone nationalists who value strength and decisiveness over thoughtful deliberation. Both have dedicated themselves to defending Christians and their faith
.. Both have taken a more forgiving view of human rights abuses.
.. “This is consistent with a nationalist, populist, authoritarian point of view,” said William Kristol, the editor at large of the conservative Weekly Standard. That view, he added, “would ridicule the promotion of human rights and democracy as globalism
.. Beyond foreign policy, some conservatives saw Mr. Putin as a committed warrior in the culture wars they were losing at home. In Russia Mr. Putin led a crackdown on gay rights by taking such steps as criminalizing behavior that could be seen as promoting anything other than heterosexual relationships. This has earned him praise from leaders of the Christian right like Franklin Graham, who said in 2014 that Russia was doing more than the United States to protect its children.
.. “He is seeking to redefine the ‘Us vs. Them’ world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent West.”
Limbaugh: ‘Energy’ Focused on Donald Trump Jr an Attempt to Destroy His Political Career Before It Starts
“We had the caller who said the Trump kids are good-looking and leftist don’t like that,” Limbaugh said. “And that’s certainly true. But, you note the energy with which the media is going after Donald Trump, Jr. And there’s reason: They want to dirty him up. They want to destroy the guy before he gets started on his own political career. He has an obvious interest in politics. I don’t know if you have heard this guy speak. Folks, he is what his dad isn’t in that he is an ideological conservative. And if you have heard him speak, he has got it down. He knows his stuff. And he can sell it, and he can be persuasive with it. And he is the exact kind of conservative they want to destroy before he gets started, especially given they don’t have a bench of their own. That is an added reason for all of this energy in destroying Donald Trump, Jr. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Limbaugh: ‘The Swamp Has Got Trump Playing the Swamp’s Game’ — ‘That’s Not What Trump Was Elected to Do’
Limbaugh argued although he was playing “the swamp’s game,” he had other tools at his disposal that he has yet to use.
.. He could fire Rosenstein, and he could fire Mueller. There’s nothing stopping him from doing it, nothing legally. He could go to Rosenstein right now. He would be perfectly within his bounds to go to Rosenstein and say, “Look, this investigation can’t be wide open for anything. You’ve gotta limit what these people can look for. You’ve gotta limit it to actual felonious crimes. You can’t have them subpoenaing anybody they want financial records, text records, tax records. There has to be a limit.”
.. If he wants to fire these people, he can. And if he wants to endure the excrement show that happens, he can. If he wants to drain the swamp, he could keep doing it.
.. Republicans have no desire to cede their power to Trump. They’re holding onto it so Trump’s in a battle with his own party for power, and of course the DOJ is not equally powerful as the executive branch
.. It’s not constitutional or legal prohibitions stopping him. It’s pure politics. And it’s the politics of the swamp, folks.
.. I think the effort to get health care passed in the House was Trump playing the swamp game. And by swamp game, I mean the traditional way to get legislation passed.
.. Now, you might say, “Well, I mean, Rush, the swamp’s the swamp. There’s no other way to get a bill passed. The president’s not a dictator.” I understand that. But Trump has many more tools at his disposal than he is aware of. I shouldn’t say that. He’s got more tools at his disposal than he is using. The power vested in the president by the Constitution in the executive branch is awesome.
Now, there are limits to it. Separation of powers. But he hasn’t gotten close to utilizing it.
.. If Trump thought the investigation was needlessly harming the country and derailing us at a time we needed to be focused on real dangers and enemies, he could do it. There would be hell to pay in the media, don’t misunderstand. I mean, it would dwarf what’s happening. But he could do it, is the point. Now, he won’t probably choose to do it because of the political ramifications of it.