Calling his latest pro-Russia moves a major "betrayal" of the country, a prominent political guru told The Daily Beast that President Donald Trump has become a historic and "extraordinary" traitor, on the level of the infamous Benedict Arnold.
This week, David Rothkopf, a prolific political commentator and former Clinton administration official, appeared on The Daily Beast Podcast to discuss the continuing fallout from Trump's efforts to appease and make deals with Vladimir Putin. This has included a controversial deal to purchase diesel fuel from Russia amid soaring prices in the U.S., and an executive order that exempted the country from new economic sanctions, a move that left many Republicans in Congress aghast.
Amid all of that, Trump has made a greater push against Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming that their strikes on Russian oil refineries are to blame for rising fuel costs and claiming that Zelensky "doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did." Ukraine has also claimed that these efforts from Trump are part of a push to get it to surrender to Russia as the war between the two nations nears the five-year mark.
Rothkopf argued that this push from Trump comes at a time when Russia is in a "pinch," and when the midterms have the president in his own sort of pinch, setting the stage for all-time worst betrayal of the U.S. and its values.
“The timing of this is associated [with] Russia being in a pinch, and because Trump is in an electoral pinch,” Rothkopf explained. “And those things coincided and have produced what is really one of the most extraordinary acts of betrayal of the United States by any public official ever, and in that I include Benedict Arnold.”
Arnold was a noted Revolutionary War general who infamously defected to the British and began commanding their forces, making him synonymous with betrayal in American culture. Rothkopf suggested that, in continuing to twist American policy to benefit Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump has put himself on the same level as Arnold, and exposed how thoroughly he is under the thrall of the Kremlin.
“I think that he has — or, at least until recently, he has — tried to present the idea that he was not completely under their thumb," Rothkop said. "And I would say, as of the past week, that’s over. The whole idea that we won the Cold War? Over. Donald Trump is subordinate to taking orders from Vladimir Putin."
He added: “You know those stories that came out after World War II, that there was some Japanese guy and he was living on an island for 20 years and he thought the war was still going on and he was still fighting it? Well, here is this KGB guy, Vladimir Putin, who... still believes in the old Soviet Union, feels the end of the Soviet Union was the worst thing that ever happened in history. He said that. And he wants to restore Russia to Soviet glory and Soviet dominance and achieve Soviet goals. That is what they’re doing. Donald Trump is weakening the U.S. military; he’s weakening our institutions; he’s weakening our democracy; he’s undermining our standing in the world; he’s weakening our alliances; he’s weakening our economy. Now, in addition to doing all of these things, which are kind of on Vladimir Putin’s to-do list for Don, he’s now doing this thing of overtly helping Putin and overtly blaming Ukraine for the illegal Russian aggression and war crimes that have taken place against Ukraine.”
