Imagine the gale-force political winds that it takes to make Donald Trump do something he doesn’t want to do. Yet that’s what happened earlier this week when the president grudgingly approved a new suite of sanctions on Russia passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress. That he signed the bill in private signalled his extreme reluctance—this is the man who threw a soiree in the Rose Garden after doomed GOP health care legislation made it through just the House. Trump, the former reality show star, only turns away the klieg lights under the most bitter circumstances, and that’s what this was.
A statement Trump released subsequently grumbled that the sanctions legislation was ‘significantly flawed’ and taunted Congress for thinking they had the aptitude to negotiate with Moscow. That got him no sympathy whatsoever from the Kremlin. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev barked in a tweet: ‘The Trump administration has shown its total weakness by handing over executive power to Congress in the most humiliating way.’
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