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President Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party into what Jeane J. Kirkpatrick once contemptuously branded the Democrats: “the blame America first crowd.”

Even by the upside-down standards of 2018, the sight of a U.S. president standing alongside a Russian one and attacking an investigation by this country’s Justice Department was disgraceful.

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Just three days after a grand jury in Washington indicted 12 Russian intelligence officials and charged them with attempting to subvert the 2016 U.S. election, Trump said “we’re all to blame” but found specific fault only with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. “The probe is a disaster for our country,” he declared. “It’s ridiculous what’s going on with the probe.”

Photo by Heikki Saukkomaa/Lehtikuva via AP

Equally stunning was that Trump did not challenge what he said were Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denials of his government’s attack on America’s democratic processes. Instead, he suggested that there is something fishy about the Democratic National Committee servers that were hacked.

He even sold out his own top intelligence officials. “My people came to me, (Director of National Intelligence) Dan Coats came to me, some others, they said they think it’s Russia,” Trump said. “I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Shortly before his meeting with Putin, Trump had given a prelude to all of this, revealing his mindset, as he often does, with a tweet:

Trump tweeted “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”