A key witness in Donald Trump's first impeachment saga suggested Tuesday that the U.S. president might have been compromised by Russia.
Alexander Vindman, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who testified that Trump had pressured Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden's son, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Trump had betrayed the war-torn nation to serve Vladimir Putin's interests.
"It's disgusting – up is down, down is up," Vindman said. "We're no longer the good actor, we no longer believe in the same values we did just a month ago. To me, I start to wonder, you know, I'm not big into conspiracies because I see government as a leaky sieve – things just don't stay secret. But now I'm starting to wonder, what does Putin have on on Trump that he's willing to bend over so hard, to bend over backwards to really support Putin's agenda? It doesn't make a huge amount of sense. He's not getting anything for it right now. He's giving away the farm."
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Trump has demanded perpetual control of half of Ukraine's natural resources and selected infrastructure in exchange for peace, but he has not asked for anything from Russia and won't even assign blame to Putin for the 2022 invasion.
"I'm not sure what kind of deal he's making, where he's giving everything that his opponent wants, nothing in return — maybe the promise, the dangle of something in the future," Vindman said. "But he's not getting anything. He's voting against Ukraine, our allies in NATO, he's calling Zelensky a dictator. He's glad-handing and saying he's going to visit Putin at the Kremlin. This is just surreal and a very, very wide departure, and it's really throwing a lot of folks for a loop. They don't know what to make of it."
Trump's foreign policy seems to be informed by his background as a deal-making businessman, said Vindman, who served on the National Security Council in the president's first administration.
"It's shocking how much continuity there is between Trump and his deal-making now and the historical pattern that I write about in 'The Folly of Realism,' everything is highly transactional," he said.
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"It's called 'The Folly of Realism' because realists believe basically that countries have interests, everything needs to be transactional. You want to maximize all your outcomes in each individual encounter. We're now at the poison Kool-Aid stage of realism, that's what you get with with Donald Trump. We have somebody that's utterly transactional, nothing that happened before matters. Even in his first administration, he didn't really make any deals with Putin before. He's now trying again, he's now resetting the same mistakes that we did in the past, and it really boggles the mind how you have somebody not learn the lessons of the past and try to strike a deal with Russia while throwing Ukraine under the bus."
"The Ukrainians are willing to bend over backwards also, they're willing to compromise maximally to end this war, but they're not going to give up their sovereignty," Vindman added. "They're not going to give up their independence. Russia is the one that needs to be pressured to come to the negotiating table. They're actually teetering in certain ways, their economy is quite brittle. If they're pushed in the right direction with sanctions, if Ukraine has some successes on the battlefield, continues to hold the Russians and maybe achieve some military successes, you could see Putin coming to the table instead. The pressure is coming off Putin, it's going on Zelensky. Again, makes very little sense from a deal-making perspective. It is maximally the folly of Trump and maximally the folly of realism."
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