CNN wrote:President Donald Trump appeared to equate US actions with the authoritarian regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview released Saturday, saying, "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?"
Trump made the remark during an interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, saying he respected his Russian counterpart.
"But he's a killer," O'Reilly said to Trump.
"There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?" Trump replied.
To get the full impact, watch the video.
When O'Reilly says "But he's a killer", Trump lets it hang in the air for a while. He nods and frowns as he mulls his answer. "A lot of killers...we got a lot of killers...you think our country's so innocent?" To me it feels like Trump feels compelled to somehow rebut or deflect O'Reilly's observation that Putin is a killer, and in his mind it's okay to throw his fellow Americans under the bus for the sake of deflecting O'Reilly's criticism of Putin. I don't think it was a conscious decision. I think Trump just sort of instinctively deflected with the first thing that came to mind.
Vladimir Putin is the wealthiest man on earth, he runs a plutocracy where homosexuals are persecuted openly, where domestic violence has been decriminalized, where journalists and opposition leaders are jailed, poisoned and murdered with relative impunity.
If you're the President of the United States and someone says that Vladimir Putin is a killer, you have to come up with a more nuanced answer than 'so are Americans'.