Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) said Tuesday on CNN’s “Out Front” that President Donald Trump was “more in love with dictators than with democracy.”
Merkley said, “It’s really been a set of events since last Wednesday that have just thrown shockwaves through the alliance. There was the Wednesday night call between President Trump and Putin without consultation with our NATO allies, or for that matter, with the Ukrainians. There was Vance’s speech, the Vice President’s. speech in Munich where he basically blamed European democracies, belittled them, treated them in has just kind of not even real partners while meeting with the far right in Germany, which has been a problematic. Element to the vision of democracy, a group that’s much more interested more in autocracy, if you will.”
“And then you have Rubio going off to Riyadh to start conversations, our secretary of state, Rubio, and excluding Ukraine and our European allies from the conversation,” he continued. “So this set of things and now with President Trump saying, well, the Ukrainians shouldn’t have started a war, it is shocking to have the leader of the United States of America not know the most fundamental elements of how this crisis came to be a Dictator, Putin, who wanted access to the sea, who took Crimea, who wanted a land bridge to Crimea, invaded and wanting to completely wipe out Ukraine.”
Merkley added, “We saw in his first administration how much he loves President Trump loves authoritarian figures. And we are seeing his authoritarian actions here at home. So in this bizarre twist of history, we have the president of our republic, our democracy, who is more in love with dictators than with democracy.”
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