In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin was not very popular among Republicans or
Democrats.
Which made sense given that he's a somewhat murderous
strongman with the nasty habit of invading his neighbors.
This is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.
Breaking news, signs of a Russian invasion in Ukraine tonight.
Since 2000, 25 journalists have died under mysterious circumstances.
The Russian military campaign in Syria after a week of airstrikes now escalating dramatically
to prop up Syrian president Assad.
This chart shows Putin’s net favorability among Republicans.
That's the percentage of people who view him favorably
minus the percent who view him unfavorably.
You can see the net favorability begin to rise steadily through 2014 and 2015,
and then, all of a sudden, in August 2016, it spikes.
By December 2016, the share of Republicans who saw Putin favorably had more than tripled.
His popularity fell among Democrats, but by a smaller margin. So, what’s going on here?
And what does it mean for the United States’ relationship with Russia?
What I think you're seeing is two years of constant Republican
propaganda about how Vladimir Putin is a strong leader.
Putin decides what he wants to do and he does it in half a day...He makes a decision and
he executes it, quickly, then everybody reacts.
That’s what you call a leader. People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears
and drills for oil.
They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans.
What you see is this Republican talking point that builds and builds and builds, and finally
really hits a peak with Donald Trump.
I think I’d get along very well with him.
I respect Putin.
He’s a strong leader.
If he says great things about me I’m going to say great things about him.
I’ve already said, he is very much of a leader.
I mean you can say, “Oh isn’t that a terrible thing.”
The man has very strong control over a country.
What we're seeing with Donald Trump is that he believes in the "Great Man Theory" of history,
both the great part of it and also the man part of it.
He's a man who sees himself as a tough decisive leader, authoritarian if necessary but willing
to do whatever it takes to push through what he thinks needs to be done.
He looks to Vladimir Putin in Russia, someone who has made clear, if you're a dissident
who criticizes him you may disappear, if you're someone in the public who isn't fully in support
of him, you may lose your job.
And he looks at that and thinks, it works.
There's also a financial connection.
Trump has had trouble getting loans from US banks following his multiple
bankruptcy filings since 1991.
We know from a speech his son, Donald Jr., made in 2008 that Russian investors have played
a big role in financing Trump projects since.
Most wealthy Russian business people maintain warm relationships with Putin, who holds absolute
power in the country.
That means the investors who helped save Trump’s business empire are likely to include several
close Putin allies.
We're in this extraordinary moment when a US President
is potentially financially beholden to an enemy country led by a dictator.
There's an intelligence report in which a former British spy claims the Russian
government has compromising information on Trump that they could use to blackmail him.
This isn't Hollywood, this isn't conspiracy, this isn't paranoia, this may actually on
some level be true.
Republican voters may be taking their cues from Trump when it comes to Putin, but Republican lawmakers
are a different story.
Vladimir Putin is a person who's killed.
He's jailed and murdered journalists, political opponents.
Putin is an aggressor that does not share our interests.
Vladimir Putin is violating the sovereignty of neighboring countries.
It certainly appears he is conducting in state-sponsored cyber attacks on what appears to be
our political system.
The Russians undermining democracy throughout the entire world.
They're taking land owned by others by force.
They did hack into our political system, they're doing it to other political systems.
Before he was Donald Trump’s Vice President, then-Representative Mike Pence held
a similar position.
And now an increasingly antagonistic Russia has been rewarded for bullying and
threatening its neighbors.
Seven years later, he was singing a different tune.
I think it’s inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country
than Barack Obama has been in this country.
When Trump praises Putin, he’s also flouting his party’s long history of skepticism toward Russia.
When you think of Republicans and the kind of leader they venerate, it's Ronald Reagan.
They come back to Reagan again and again and again.
I remember when Ronald Reagan was the president.
He stood on principle standing up to the Soviet Union.
Ronald Reagan reignited the American economy, rebuilt the military, bankrupted the Soviet
Union and defeated Soviet communism.
And they come back to him because they think he won the Cold War, and because they think
he beat the Soviet Union.
The march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of
history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression
of the people.
This is not just a break from Republicans on the Hill in 2016, this is a break with
the last 30 years of ideology, dating back to a President,
Ronald Reagan, who they hold up as a near god-like figure.
Trump has also been slow to accept the CIA and FBI’s conclusion that Russia sought
to influence the Presidential election.
Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee Servers,
it hacked the personal email of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman
As far as hacking I think it was Russia, but I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.
Vladimir Putin weaponized the fact that we have a free press.
He used Wikileaks to kind of launder the information, and then dribbled it out day by day by day.
So for weeks, in the run up to the election, all you saw was negative press coverage of
Hillary Clinton driven by selectively chosen leaked emails.
In response, President Obama issued economic sanctions against Russia,
which Donald Trump doesn't have to keep
These were weak, these sanctions, they're gonna do nothing.
Vladimir Putin will look at this and say, I got what I wanted, I can pay this cost,
I'll do it again.