What fun the internet is having now that Vladimir Putin has finally met Donald Trump. Social media is teeming with jokes, gifs, and memes about the two big dawgs of global politics finally coming together. It’s the great bromance of the populist age. Underneath the hilarity, however, there remains intense suspicions about the relationship between Trump and Putin – it is now widely accepted, even if the evidence is still hotly disputed, that Russia ‘hacked the election’ in order to ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Trump’s meeting with Sergei Lavrov in May was considered highly nefarious, especially after Trump accidentally gave away a state secret, apparently just to show off. Reports today suggest, darkly, that Putin will ‘manipulate Trump with flattery’ to make him bend to his will.
But the reality is different. The Trump administration has not initiated any great rapprochement between Moscow and Washington; in fact, the irony of the Trump presidency is that for all the people saying ‘OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING’ on the internet, we’ve seen no substantial change in US-Russian relations, just the usual subterranean cold-war antagonism.
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