Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, comments this morning on President Doanld Trump’s visit to the G-20 meeting and especially about his meeting with Vladmir Putin.  Dowd meanders a bit but finally gets down to her barbs about Trump and Putin.  She comments:

“In his attenuated first meeting with his side bae [boyfriend], Trump staged a Kabuki show of confronting the former K.G.B. agent.

Their conversation boiled down to this:

Trump: “Did you do it [attempt to influence our election]?”

Putin: “Nyet.”

Trump: “Whew! Glad that’s out of the way. So let’s do a joint cybersecurity program and share our passwords.”

Putin: “Da.”

He should have had a showdown to rival the one Adlai Stevenson had at the U.N. with the Soviet ambassador on the Cuban missile crisis. “I am prepared to wait for an answer until hell freezes over,” Stevenson snapped.

Trump should have slapped down the evidence and doled out the punishment. Instead, he and Putin commiserated about bumptious journalists.

“Polonium [poison[ works well,” Putin was probably saying.

“Spasibo [Thank you]” Trump probably replied.

In the end, Trump and fellow bumbling neophyte Rex Tillerson opened the portal wider for Putin to sneak through in coming elections.

I don’t know how much information the tyro pol in the Oval has absorbed — or even wants to absorb — in his dumbed-down briefings. But, brainwashed by his father’s exhortation that the world belongs to “killers,” Trump clearly doesn’t recognize the danger before him.

This is a simple fact he might want to let sink in: The Russians do not have our best interests at heart. They are conjuring Trump’s worst “1984” fear: playing him for a sucker.”

This sucker is the President of the United States with all its resources at his disposal.

Tony