According to a lawsuit filed against Fox News by a former Playboy model who says she had an affair with Donald Trump before he was president, network host Tucker Carlson falsely accused her of extortion by claiming she “approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money," The New York Times reports.

"Now that sounds like a classic case of extortion," Carlson said during his show on Dec. 10, 2018. "Yet for whatever reason, Trump caves to it, and he directs Michael Cohen to pay the ransom. Now, more than two years later, Trump is a felon for doing this. It doesn't seem to make any sense."

For aging Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers who are old enough to remember the Cold War, the admiration that the alt-right has for Russian President Vladimir Putin — a former KGB agent — is quite ironic. And that irony isn’t lost on conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot, who is highly critical of President Donald Trump’s pro-Putin outlook in his December 4 column.

Boot, now 50, was born in Moscow on September 12, 1969 — back when Moscow was still part of the Soviet Union. But he was still a kid when his parents fled the Soviet Union and moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up. The Soviet Union ceased to exist in the early 1990s, and Putin is a right-wing authoritarian — not a communist. Boot, however, emphasizes in his column that Russia is still no friend of the United States.