Hours later than he was supposed to get there on Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump went to Canada to participate in the annual G7 summit of world leaders. Hanging over that summit are Trump’s recent aggressive tariffs he imposed on our allies — and an assertion he offered before his departure for Canada that Russia should be allowed to rejoin the group.
He told reporters at the White House:
‘I love our country. I have been Russia’s worst nightmare. If Hillary got in — I think Putin is probably going man I wish Hillary won, because you see what I do. But with that being said, Russia should be in this meeting. Why are we having this meeting without Russia being in the meeting? I would recommend — and it’s up to them — but Russia should be in the meeting.’
Joe Biden, the most recent U.S. vice president ahead of the current administration, offered a statement in response to that assertion from Trump.
The statement, as posted to Twitter, reads:
‘Putin’s Russia invaded its neighbors, violated our sovereignty by undermining elections, and attacks dissidents abroad. Yet our President wants to reward him with a seat at the table while alienating our closest democratic allies. It makes no sense.’
Biden has raised similar concerns about Trump’s take on Russia in the past, suggesting at one point, as others have, that the Kremlin has damaging information on the current U.S. president that they’re keeping private in exchange for Trump molding U.S. policy to be more in line with their wishes.
It’s a suggestion bolstered by the controversial collection of allegations against Trump collected by former British spy Christopher Steele, and it’s one that Biden raised in the same vein as his above comments — the observation that the president’s continued capitulation to Russian interests just “makes no sense.”
Trump has given credence to the Russian position at numerous points throughout his presidency through such means as downplaying the threat of their meddling in our elections. His administration lagged majorly in imposing Congressionally mandated sanctions on key Russian interests in response to the components to that meddling which took place during the 2016 election cycle.
Even still, the fact that the sanctions are currently in place doesn’t do away with the fact that at times Trump has gone so far down the rabbit hole that he’s asserted that he believes that Vladimir Putin doesn’t believe his country to have meddled in our elections at all, even if they actually did — as if that is a sound foreign policy stance.
The reality of the situation is as Biden describes — Russia has carried on and continues to carry on with a campaign of aggression around the world. That aggression has taken forms ranging from their meddling in U.S. elections to their intrusion into the Crimean peninsula, which is what prompted the country getting kicked out of what was formerly the G8 group of world leaders in the first place. Russia, at present, is continuing with their occupation of that peninsula, which was a part of Ukraine, no matter whether President Trump wants to acknowledge the gravity of the situation or not.
Check out Twitter’s response to Biden below.
Featured Image via Mark Wilson/ Getty Images
