President Donald Trump has faced multiple setbacks in his first month in office, and it's leading some of his fans in Russia to question if he's really the tough leader they once believed.
As Foreign Policy notes, the tone against Trump has shifted over the past week, as many Russian politicians are questioning whether he really has the will to take on his political opposition, both in terms of his rivals in the Democratic Party and within the intelligence community.
In fact, one popular picture that's making rounds on Russian social media this week is a photograph of graffiti sprayed on the side of a garbage depot that reads, "Trump is a f*ggot."
Moscow-based photographer Sergey Sukhorukov was among the Russians who shared the photo on his Facebook page this week, where he also wrote that Trump had "betrayed" Russia despite the fact that the country had "believed" in him. In particular, he ranted against a statement from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer this week saying that Russia should give Crimea back to Ukraine.
Elsewhere, Foreign Policy reports that right-wing politician Nikolai Travkin was deeply unhappy with Trump's decision to fire former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, and he said that Trump's decision to ax the Russian-friendly adviser meant that he was now "close to failure."
And Leonid Slutsky, head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said this week that he and his colleagues had gotten ahead of themselves by assuming that Trump would carry out Russia's foreign policy wishes instead of his own country's.
"We were too early in our decision, made with absolute sympathy towards President Trump’s constructive rhetoric, that he would somehow be pro-Russian," he said.
Earlier this week, we also learned that Russian President Vladimir Putin had instructed state media to stop being quite so effusive in its praise for Trump, as one Russian reporter told Bloomberg TV that "the fate of Russia-American relations is much less predictable than it was just a few weeks ago."
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