Former President Donald Trump weighed in on the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Monday by making the tragic event about himself. “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”
Missing from Trump’s obscene comparison of his legal troubles to Russia’s brutal repression of Navalny — who died last week at the age of 47 in an Arctic penal colony — was any mention of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his culpability in Navalny’s treatment. Trump’s omission of Putin’s role warrants criticism. But his statement has at least one top Democrat reaching for conspiratorial explanations.
Trump is openly sympathetic to people he sees as kindred autocratic spirits.
Former House speaker and Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California reacted to Trump’s statement by implying Putin was covertly pulling the strings. “You wonder what does Putin have on Donald Trump that he always has to be beholden to him,” she mused in an interview with MSNBC. In response to a follow-up question about what that might be, Pelosi said she wasn’t sure but speculated, “either something financial he has on him, or something on the come, something that he expects to get.”
Pelosi’s conjecture is reminiscent of the conspiracy theory that many Democrats and liberal commentators and activists have floated for years: that Putin holds some kind of “kompromat” on Trump which renders him subservient to Russian interests. But why succumb to evidence-free, and at times outlandish, speculation about secret sources of leverage over Trump when a simpler explanation lies before us? Trump is soft on Putin because he admires him on an ideological level.
If the fundamental explanation for Trump’s softness on Putin were some…
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