Malcolm Nance warns that Trump has a disturbing habit of parroting dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Trump has already surrendered to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in advance of their upcoming summit — but as intelligence expert Malcolm Nance points out, Trump has a long history of doing Moscow's bidding.
On Sunday morning's edition of "AM Joy," Nance explained how Trump emerged from a 2013 meeting with Russian oligarchs spouting Russian talking points on issues like NATO and the European Union. Nance was on AM Joy to discuss his new book, "How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West."
"In the perspective of Moscow, he is clearly their asset," Nance said of Trump. "He is enunciating their point of view."
Nance also pointed out something disturbing: Trump tends to imitate the language and arguments of people he's "comfortable" with.
And lately, Trump seems to be feeling very comfortable around dictators like Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un.
"One thing that we've learned about Donald Trump is that when he gets around people he's comfortable with, he immediately picks up their verbiage, their terminology," Nance said. "It happened with Kim Jong Un. One day he goes in and we're doing 'exercises' in South Korea, the next day we're doing 'provocative war games.' I mean, he picks these things up.
"This man is clearly in debt to Moscow in some way," Nance continued. "I'll leave it up to Robert Mueller to figure out the terms and circumstances of that debt is. But he is not working in the interest of the United States."
Trump himself has bragged about the 2013 meeting to which Nance refers. In 2015, he told Hugh Hewitt that he met "with the top level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people," and called them "terrific people."
Nance also argued that "no president of the United States would ever say that NATO was obsolete" or should be dismantled.
Although there are a few isolationist Republicans who oppose NATO because they think it's too expensive to defend our allies, Nance made clear that Trump is different — he takes the positions he does because he admires Putin's strongman tactics, not because he's trying to do what's best for America.
Trump's hostility to NATO is part of a package of other pro-Russia policy positions, like breaking up the EU and the Russian invasion of Crimea. And most recently, Trump once again supported Putin's absurd denial that Russia had anything to do with interfering in our elections.
Perhaps most damning, though, is Trump's willingness to not just side with dictators like Putin and Kim, but to side against America.
As Nance pointed out, Trump came away from his summit with Kim attacking American training exercises as "provocative war games."
Many experts agree that Russia may have something on Trump that can be used as leverage to blackmail him.
But it is also unquestionably true that Trump has a lot more in common with the dictators he emulates than with any American leader.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
