OPINION:
Well, we finally got to see the funny side of Vladimir Putin, the usually dour president of Russia.
Vladi is not known for joking around. Ask Yevgeny Prigozhin if you can find him. But seriously, Mr. Putin — when the spirit moves him — can be as funny as any American president, except perhaps Calvin Coolidge.
Cal was not a lot of laughs. He was too busy balancing the budget and building bridges — that sort of thing. Yet Vladi does not have to balance his budget, so when the president of Russia jokes, he can sometimes deliver a real knee-slapper.
Of course, he demonstrated his more serious side on Aug. 23 in the skies above Tver when he administered to his old pal — in fact, to his personal caterer, Yevgeny Prigozhin — what we might call “the jolly what-for.” I estimate that Prigozhin enjoyed Mr. Putin’s jolly what-for for about a split second before kaboom, the bomb went off in Prigozhin’s airplane, and it crashed.
That was the Vladimir Putin we have come to know, but apparently, there is another side to him, a lighter side, a whimsical side. Mr. Putin displayed his lighter side in his recent musings on former President Donald Trump’s legal predicament.
Mr. Putin said: “What’s happening with Trump is a persecution of a political rival for political motives.”
Well, that is not the funniest political joke I have ever heard, but it is better than what we heard from former political bigwigs residing in the Kremlin, such as Leonid Brezhnev or Josef Stalin. Stalin had no sense of humor at all. And Mr. Putin almost immediately reverted to politics on this occasion, saying, “This shows the whole rottenness of the American political system, which cannot claim to teach others about democracy.”
Frankly, Vladi, I preferred you when you were trying to be amusing.
As for Mr. Trump, he agreed with Mr. Putin’s joke. Mr. Trump stands accused of 91 charges at the state and federal levels for conspiring to undo the results of the 2020 election, and he thinks the charges are baseless. So does Vladi.
They even appear baseless to me.
Yet the first time Donald trotted out his joke about his warm feelings for the president of Russia, he set himself up for trouble. From that point on, Mr. Trump had the entire intelligence community on his trail, all the Democrats on Capitol Hill, and even Hillary Clinton, who herself left a trail of incriminating documents in her wake that would have been enough to jail a lesser celebrity. There was almost nothing to the charges raised against Mr. Trump.
The Steele dossier that was bandied about forever, the Muller Report that almost killed its author — on and on it goes. What does one learn from this fabulous concatenation of lies and exaggerations?
I spent years chasing down the Steele nonsense and the Muller mumbo-jumbo. The prostitutes urinating in a hotel bed in Moscow particularly caught my eye. There was nothing to any of the charges against Mr. Trump, and I guess there will be nothing that sticks in the legal charges being brought against him.
Yet one thing strikes me still: Why did the intelligence community fasten its attention on Donald Trump? And why did it fasten its attention on Mr. Trump so early in his political career? Did they know something about the New York real estate mogul that we still do not know?
Nothing has turned up yet, and so the Democrats have turned to the courts. They are at work in four different courtrooms nationwide, which will surely disrupt Mr. Trump’s primary schedule. Can this be legal?
In the meantime, we have the new Vladimir Putin to contend with. All of a sudden, he is a stand-up comic. He will not be getting any laughs from Yevgeny Prigozhin, but Donald Trump is in his corner, and there may be millions more.
Glory to Ukraine!
• R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the author most recently of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson Inc. His memoirs, “How Do We Get Out of Here: Half a Century of Laughter and Mayhem at The American Spectator — From Bobby Kennedy to Donald J. Trump,” will be published by Post Hill Press in September and can be ordered online now from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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