President Donald Trump is currently finding himself between a rock and a hard place after having spent years promoting his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which his Make America Great Again (MAGA) base embraced, and now finding he can't deal with the Russian strongman as he tries to get a peace deal worked out over the Ukraine invasion.
According to one international relations expert, Trump's turning on Putin is not going over well with his supporters who he has programmed to hate Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Appearing on MSNBC's "Way Too Early" Wednesday morning, Elise Labott, the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council in Foreign Relations, claimed Trump's desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize is at loggerheads with a substantial number of his followers who want him to stick with Putin.
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What happens next, Labott told host Ali Velshi, could cause a major rift among the president's most loyal followers.
"This is another really fascinating dynamic where, listen, he tried with President Putin, you know," Labott began. "He wanted to be best friends. This love affair, he's a strong man. But he's he's seeing and he's even saying, you know, I think he's maybe he's stringing me along."
"And President Trump, I think the last time we spoke, doesn't like to look like a chump, doesn't like to look like a loser and so he's starting to think. how can I, you know, he does want to end the war in Ukraine and he's seeing that maybe Russia is after all the villain that's in, you know, complete opposition to what his MAGA base thinks. They're very anti-Ukraine, pro-Russia," she claimed.
"I feel like this is the first test case whether President Trump will be able to bring his MAGA base along with him, or will he have to follow and go back to this idea of, I'm going to bend to what Putin wants. Right now, you see him trying; he didn't say that much over the weekend when Ukraine made all these strikes into Russia," she observed.
"You would have thought that he would, he did the last couple of times he blamed Ukraine for the war," Labott pointed out. "Now he's starting to say President Putin is crazy, President Putin is ruining Russia, he's ruining the world. So, you know, Steve Bannon and that whole MAGA crowd, Tucker Carlson, they're really, you know, coming to rubs here and I think this is a very interesting case. I think we should really watch this space."
"President Trump wants his Nobel Peace Prize, right? He wants it in Ukraine, he wants it in Israel. He wants it in India/Pakistan," she added. "And so this idea that Trump to be the dealmaker, Trump can be the big global statesman is really in complete opposition to this MAGA isolationist idea. And that, I think, is which Trump is going to win out."
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