Cooper: Trump looking down the road?

U.S. President Donald Trump, left, speaks alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin during a news conference after their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, Monday. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
U.S. President Donald Trump, left, speaks alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin during a news conference after their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, Monday. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday. Maybe you read about it.

We're always of several minds about the president - ours, not theirs. Theirs is a bad actor on the world stage.

Ours sometimes says one thing when he means another, or says one thing when he plans to do another. In many cases, the latter may not be too bad.

We don't believe Trump had his best moment standing next to Putin in Helsinki, stating that after talking to the Russian president he didn't "see any reason why [Russia] would be" involved in efforts to undermine United States elections in 2016. He exacerbated the problem by casting doubt on U.S. intelligence reports that categorically stated Russia did attempt to meddle in the election.

But, as we often have seen before, the president sometimes blusters in public, then acts efficiently, strategically and wisely out of public view. The North Korea rapprochement is one example. Nothing - or something significant - may come from the bluster-and-negotiate sessions with the communist country, but it's a larger stride toward peace with North Korea than his predecessor made in eight years.

Trump may have in mind a broader economic future with Russia or the thought that the two nuclear powers could act jointly in taming global turmoils. Thus, the appeasing language might have had a purpose - to open the doors for something else.

However, if that is what the president is trying to do, he must not lose sight of what Russia has been and still is.

Despite the best efforts of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and Soviet Union Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, Russia has been a dictatorship for most of the last century. Many thousands of people died at the hands of its leaders, whether by execution or starving. Its operatives have secretly shot, poisoned or otherwise eliminated those who wanted change.

In recent years, Russia annexed Crimea, invaded Ukraine and assisted a mass killer in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Its motives are not pure.

So, it was naturally disappointing to hear Trump publicly speak at the meeting between the two leaders as if the countries were on equal footing - as if one wasn't a force for liberty and the other one wasn't a force for instability.

Some members of both sides of the politics aisle were similarly concerned and said so in overblown rhetoric, perhaps forgetting that the president may have been trying to be conciliatory, to lay groundwork for future talks or to, as his wont, continue picking at old scabs as he did with words about Hillary Clinton's emails and Democratic computer servers.

Even far-left columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post said Trump, until answering the question about Russian meddling, "was doing pretty well laying out a modest but achievable agenda for improving U.S.-Russian relations" and "managing the Helsinki summit quite sensibly."

And U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., made the case that the reaction to the one question was just more of what many have called "Trump derangement syndrome."

"I think people have gotten over the top on this and lost the big picture," he said on CNN. "The big picture is that we should be engaged with Russia. We should have conversations with Russia. We have serious conflicts in various parts of the globe. It would be a mistake not to have open lines of communication with them."

He went on to spell out an inconvenient truth - that protecting the integrity of all future U.S. elections is much more important than desperately - and so far unsuccessfully - trying to tie Trump into any 2016 Russian meddling and becoming unglued about one remark.

"Nobody is talking about protecting the integrity of the elections," he said. " There are a lot of ways to make sure our election is not tampered with."

Going forward, whether or not Trump is now trying on the "good cop" hat with Russia in order to gain something down the road, we believe he must keep in mind who the country is, what it has done and what it is likely to continue doing.

We don't discount the possibility that something good can come out of the countries working together, or that the president has something up his sleeve, but we hope in the future he'll find a way to be tough but flexible. It's been done before. Presidents Nixon and Reagan both found openings with the former Soviet Union that way.

But, to be sure, the groveling, global Obama model didn't look very good on Trump in Helsinki.

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