Why did Trump endorse old Soviet talking points on Afghanistan?...But there’s one angle to this that lingered in my mind: where, exactly, did Trump get this bogus history lesson?
...It sure would be nice to know who played the role of history teacher for the confused American president.
Maybe Trump just made it up, which is possible given his over-active imagination and his capacity for concocting all kinds of strange beliefs, though the level of specificity suggests someone actually told him a story.
It seems unlikely Trump read it somewhere, since he’s not much of a reader, and it’s implausible to think he’d deliberately brush up on Middle East history from the 1970s. It seems even less likely that he heard this from someone on his staff, since the president’s aides generally don’t encourage him to believe Soviet propaganda. He probably didn’t get this from conservative media, since Fox News doesn’t devote much airtime to covering Soviet foreign policy from the Carter era.
So who put this nonsense in Trump’s head? The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler asked, “Is it possible that Trump’s remarks on Afghanistan … reflect a conversation he had with Putin?”
That need not be a rhetorical question.
Postscript: Jon Chait added yesterday, “Meanwhile, the Russian government is moving an official resolution defending the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (The approval is scheduled to take place next month.) Russians have previously called the invasion a tragic error, but Vladimir Putin’s regime — which regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as a world-historical tragedy — is systematically rehabilitating various Soviet crimes.”
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