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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Sidney Blumenthal

Biden’s agonizing debate performance doesn’t change the reality of this election

white man wearing blue suit stands at podium with crowd of people behind him
‘Biden has run for more reasons than his grasp of the state of the party.’ Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

I saw western civilization pass before my eyes as Joe Biden drowned.

“Putin is waiting for Trump,” John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, has said. When the presidential debate turned to foreign policy, the former president made an apparently startling revelation. He implied that he had a previously unknown conversation with Vladimir Putin before his invasion of Ukraine, perhaps in late 2021 or early 2022. According to Trump, Russia’s president discussed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “When Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream,” he said. That dream, of course, is the conquest of Ukraine as the restoration of the major piece of the collapsed Soviet Union after the cold war.

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