President Donald Trump said Tuesday morning that his presidency is being evaluated by an unfair double standard that has allowed critics to attack him over his promises of a warmer relationship with Russia while his predecessor cut deals with Iran, a longtime U.S. foe.
“I don't know Putin, have no deals in Russia, and the haters are going crazy - yet Obama can make a deal with Iran, #1in terror, no problem!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
During his candidacy, transition and now his presidency, Trump has repeatedly pledged to improve ties between the U.S. and Russia, a relationship that former President Barack Obama and his initial secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, tried in vain to reset. Instead, that relationship deteriorated further with Russia’s annexation of Crimea away from Ukraine and Russian military activity in the eastern part of that country.
Trump has said that he would consider lifting sanctions put in place against Russia to punish it for its aggressive behavior towards Ukraine, perhaps in exchange for a reduction of nuclear weapons.
Russian cyberattacks were also to blame for hacks into the computer and email systems of the Democratic National Committee as well as a handful of high-profile political individuals, most of them Democrats. Just before Obama left office, the U.S. intelligence community released its assessment that those attacks had been carried out by Russia with the specific goal of aiding Trump’s candidacy, conclusions that the president had long disputed.
And while Trump repeated on Tuesday that he does not know Russian President Vladimir Putin, the president has said in the past that he does know him. Trump said in a 2013 interview on MSNBC that “I do have a relationship” with Putin, and in 2014, he told attendees at the CPAC conference that Putin had given him a gift to celebrate Trump bringing his Miss Universe pageant to Moscow.
Trump has been harshly critical of Obama’s relationship with Iran and especially of the nuclear deal agreed to by Iran, the U.S., Germany and the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. That agreement lifted certain sanctions in place against Iran in exchange for a program to close off Iranian avenues to creating a nuclear weapon. Trump, who vowed on the campaign trail to tear up the deal, has kept it in place but also rolled out a fresh wave of sanctions last week.