center when french president emmanuel macron comes to the white house. this is a later first state dinner due to covid. however, no less important to the white house given the state of the relationship between the two leaders. there s no question when you talk to white house officials they point to france s role inside the eu and inside a critically important trans atlantic relationship. also the relationship between the two men. several meetings on the sidelines of big summits, multiple phone calls between the two in regular contact over the course of the last several months. there are foreign policy issues to deal with. there s no question about that. there are also very real domestic issues president macron is going to bring to president
last 30 years that ultimately leads to mutually assured destruction. one of the things that i think we have to update our thinking when it comes to what we think the russians are going to do. the russians and putin terribly misunderstood and miscalculated what the united states would do in response to his invasion of ukraine. he misjudged what the ukrainian people were willing to do and misjudged the cohesiveness of the trans atlantic relationship. at the end of the day i think the united states of america we need to think about first principles and those in my opinion is how do we defend against the loss of life? and what are we doing to make sure the ukrainians are able to defend themselves and how do we make sure our nato allies are ready to do that, too? bill: that s what the migs were all about. help us make sense of something we ve been thinking a lot about. we re essentially at war with
attack on hillary clinton and the dnc e-mail server and american journalists seeming to suggest that democrats, democrats are the one to blame for the cyberattack that the democrats should have had better security. president trump today also called putin a good competitor and meant it as a compliment and asks if he holds russia accountable for anything in the breakdown of the relationship, could not name one thing or did not. did not note the seizure of crimea or the invasion of eastern ukraine, the poisoning of individuals in the uk or the major cyberattack and interference in the election. president trump saying, quote, we are all to blame for the poor relationship between the u.s. and russia and that the relationship has never been worse but also that it had changed as of four hours ago. it is not hard to see why that might be but now the key question seems to be why. why does the president of the united states believe vladimir putin, former kgb officer, over
hoped to accomplish. but should any of this really be a surprise? throughout his campaign, president trump constantly made a moral equivalence of the united states and russia. again, he kills journalists that don t agree with him. well, i think our country does plenty of killing, also, joe. still even with the campaign rhetoric, stunning today when president trump sided with putin over americans including over his own intelligence chiefs when asked who he believed. let s discuss. michelle kosinski, you heard the woman of russian state television crowing about the fact that of course. where brezhnev and the rest failed, president trump destroyed or shaken at least what she called the trans atlantic relationship. what she is talking about is the united states and nato. trump is doing what yeltsin and
and the united states were to team up on some matters. even if that means rejecting that consensus view. how would you respond to that? there are clearly places where the united states and russia need to have a dialogue but you have to enter into those discussions from a position of strength. and what we saw today was complete capitulation. i don t know what his definition of a strong relationship is but one version of it is one which country is a client of the other country and right now it seems as if president trump is willing to do and say whatever vladimir putin wants him to say, whether it be doubting that the russians interfered in our election or trump s insistence over the weekend in helping to dismantle nato and the eu which is by the way putin s number one objective. if you want to work with the russians on counterterrorism or on the problems in the middle east, they have to respect you. and right now they don t respect us. lavrov, the foreign minister,