Almost immediately after Russia’s Vladimir Putin launched an invasion into Ukraine, Donald Trump has tried to blame the war on the Biden administration. The line has never made sense — even John Bolton, Trump’s former White House national security advisor, didn’t buy it — but the former president has peddled the line in recent years anyway.
In a speech in North Carolina devoted to national security, however, the Republican added a new chapter to his weird story. This was the anecdote the GOP candidate shared with supporters:
“Remember when Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine. She met with Putin, and then three days later, he attacked. How did she do? Do you think she did a good job? She met with Putin to tell him, ‘Don’t do it.’ And three days later, he attacked. That’s when the attack started.”
At that point, Trump turned to retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg and asked, “Did you know that, general?”
Cameras didn’t capture Kellogg’s response, but I have a hunch he wasn’t familiar the story about the Harris-Putin meeting — because it only happened in Trump’s overactive imagination.
Let’s briefly review a handful of pertinent details.
First, Trump still doesn’t pronounce Vice President Kamala Harris’ name correctly.
Second, Harris didn’t meet with Putin ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Trump, whose relationship with reality is often fractured, appears to have simply made this up.
Third, the Democratic vice president, shortly before the war began, did attend the 2022 Munich Security Conference, representing the Biden administration. Trump would apparently have people believe that the vice president’s efforts were somehow a failure, but reality suggests otherwise: Harris met with officials from U.S. allies — not with Russia’s authoritarian leader — and helped solidify the Western alliance, which has been steadfast in its opposition to Moscow’s aggression. And finally, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if anyone should avoid talking about private and undisclosed chats with Putin, it’s the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee. Remember this Politico report from June 2019? President Donald Trump said Wednesday his lips are sealed about what he and Russian President Vladimir Putin say to each other behind closed doors. Ahead of his expected meeting with Putin on the sidelines of this weekend’s G-20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, the president told reporters that while he expected to have a positive conversation with Putin, he would not divulge whether he will press the adversarial leader about election interference. “I will have a very good conversation with him,” Trump said, adding, “What I say to him is none of your business.”
Months earlier, The Washington Post reported that Trump went to “extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations” with the Russian autocrat — at one point even “taking possession” of his own interpreter’s notes after a conversation with Putin. It’s a dynamic, in other words, in which Trump has to make up an imaginary conversation between Harris and Putin, while Democrats can reference actual conversations between Trump and Putin.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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