Nancy Pelosi: “With you all roads lead to Putin.” Photo: WaPo

Most of us remember Nancy Pelosi standing up and pointing across the table at Donald Trump during his first term declaring, “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”  And during the final televised presidential debate in 2016, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being a “puppet” for Russian President Vladimir Putin. [1, 2].

I remember both “Putin’s Puppet” media moments well.

In 2016 during the televised debate Trump wanted to make Clinton look bad by saying Putin had no respect for her.  That’s when Hillary coolly retorted, “That’s because he would rather have a puppet as President of the United States.”  Trump’s clever come-back was this:  “I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me.”

Clinton went on to say on the televised debate stage in 2016:

“He [Putin] would rather have a puppet as President of the United States…The Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans. They have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people of institutions, then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the internet. This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly from Putin himself as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election. So I actually think the most important question of this evening is, will Donald trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election, that he rejects Russian espionage against Americans, which he actually encouraged in the past. Those are the questions we need answered. We’ve never had any thing like this happen in any election before.”

Watch:

Two smart, strong, courageous, accomplished democratic women demonized by Fox News and the right wing propaganda machine. Turns out they were not only right all along but more importantly, willing to say it out loud – on TV and in official settings.

It seems like more and more now, people are getting it.  But what took the country so long to understand the implications of Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin? Why have the media neglected and abandoned this story? Are we ready to deal with it as a country now? The mid-terms will tell.

Here’s the latest from The Lincoln Project. Maybe it will have more credence when it’s a man saying it.

And finally this, my favorite televised stand-up-to-Trump moment. Pelosi ripping Trump’s SOTU speech to shreds in 2020 and then telling reporters afterwards, “It was a manifesto of mistruths.”