Our response went far beyond anything that the Bush administration had done to Russia after it invaded Georgia in 2008, but Republicans still castigated Obama as weak. Some even praised Putin as a strong leader, someone to be admired. Watching this, Obama told me that it represented something of a turning point for a Republican Party that had been rooted in opposition to Russia for decades. In Obama’s view, the praise for Putin that you could see on Fox News went beyond partisanship, though that was part of it; Putin was a white man standing up for a politics rooted in patriarchy, tribe, and
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