It’s ironic to hear CNN’s Dana Bash and Reuters’s Jeff Mason slam Trump for “parroting” Moscow’s talking points when they’re just as guilty of pushing their own slant, casting Zelensky as a saint and Putin as a devil. They call out Trump’s supposed propaganda, but they’re spinning a narrative too—blaming Russia entirely while glossing over Ukraine’s provocations or NATO’s decades-long eastward expansion. They decry disinformation yet present their take as undisputed fact, straight from Kyiv’s playbook.
Take Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican Congressman since 1995, representing the poorest state, who brands Putin a war criminal deserving life in jail or execution. Yet Wicker voted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and continues to vote to fund Ukraine’s war effort with weapons, making him, by his own logic, a war criminal worthy of the same fate he’d assign to Putin.
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Dana Bash: How long can Zelensky now last?
Reuters WH Correspondent, Jeff Mason: Well, I mean, that underscores a couple different things. Number one, President Trump is clearly using some talking points from Moscow in his own rhetoric, both with, with reporters and on Truth Social. And now Russia is basically thanking him for that and amplifying it more by praising Trump and using that same cycle that has started to, to underscore the, the points that it has been making now for a couple years. And they are, I don’t wanna say they’re working together, but the two things are helping each other out. They’re both amplifying each other’s messages. And that is a clear shift from decades of US policy, and certainly the US position with its allies over the last three years during the war.
Dana Bash: Yeah, and the disinformation campaign or the world of disinformation. How this is what Zelensky talked about. This is precisely what he’s referring to.
Reuters WH Correspondent, Jeff Mason: Yeah, absolutely.
Dana Bash: That, that Trump is quite literally parroting the talking points from Putin. Not only talking about the idea that this is Ukraine’s fault when this was a brazen attempt to try to seize Ukraine and put it back and give it back to Mother Russia, which is how Vladimir Putin believes that part of the world should look. Uh, and the list goes on and on and on. Um, I’d wanna ask about how this is actually being perceived in corners of Donald Trump’s party, the Republican Party, because obviously, this is not the Republican Party that we all started to cover when we started here in Washington, because it was much more hawkish. Now there’s very much a populous bent, which is how Donald Trump is where he is. But the chair of the Armed Services Committee in the United States Senate, a Republican, Roger Wicker, um, he cannot even hide how disgusted he is with the shift in position. Listen to what he said to our colleague Manu Rashu.
Manu Rashu: Do you think that Putin can be trusted in these negotiations?
Deep State Roger Wicker (R): No, Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.