Does Vladimir Putin own President Trump? | The Tylt

Back in 2017, Michelle Goldberg said there was little question that Russia collaborated with the Trump campaign, and that our president is beholden to Vladimir Putin.

This country — at least the parts not wholly under the sway of right-wing propaganda — needs to come to terms with substantial evidence that the president is in thrall to a foreign power.

Now Trump is tarnishing U.S. alliances around the world.

Eighteen months into the Trump presidency, Josh Marshall says it's time to stop tiptoeing around the truth: virtually all Trump's international decisions have been on Putin's dream list. Who does our president really work for?

President Trump has acted consistently and with some success to destabilize and break up the western alliance....He has also worked consistently on really every front to advance the interests of Russia.

But conservatives argue Trump's opponents are spreading wild conspiracy theories. Yes, there is some smoke here, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's fire.

Other than Trump’s public pleading with Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails, which he says was a joke, and his open praise of Russia front group WikiLeaks, there’s little evidence that he had a more sinister alliance with Putin.

And Trump did expel scores of Russian diplomats in March of 2018.

In the sternest move yet against Russia since he became President, Donald Trump’s White House said it was working with Nato allies to punish Russia for its suspected poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and the “unacceptably high” number of Russian spies in the US.

Even if he is Putin's creature, the majority of Republicans don't care. And of course, the president himself claims the entirety of the special counsel investigation into his campaign's relationship with Russia is a witch hunt, invented by the Democrats.