How Trump Just Became Our Modern Benedict Arnold: Political Guru

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters Benedict Arnold may have some competition for the title of America’s most infamous traitor, according to one foreign policy expert who says President Donald Trump’s latest moves to help Russia amount to a historic “betrayal” of the United States.

Daily Beast Chief Global Affairs Columnist David Rothkopf laid out the president’s controversial actions over the past few weeks.

Trump, 80, waived sanctions on Russia, allowed the importation of Russian diesel , demanded that Ukraine stop striking Russian oil refineries, claimed President Volodymyr Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” and told Ukrainians to “get a new president.” Meanwhile, Ukraine claims the U.S. has restricted its access to Starlink, the satellite internet network it needs to fight Russia, and has described lapses in intelligence-sharing that have left it without advance warning of deadly Russian strikes.

Zelensky also said in an interview Sunday that Trump is trying to force his country to surrender.

“The timing of this is associated [with] Russia being in a pinch, and because Trump is in an electoral pinch,” Rothkopf said on The Daily Beast Podcast .

“And those things coincided and have produced what is really one of the most extraordinary acts of betrayal of the United States by any public official ever, and in that I include Benedict Arnold.” Revolutionary War turncoat Arnold was a major general in the Continental Army who defected to the British and commanded forces against the troops he once led.

In the U.S., he is remembered as a traitor.

Trump’s deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin puts him in a similar category, Rothkopf said.

“I think that he has—or, at least until recently, he has—tried to present the idea that he was not completely under their thumb.

And I would say, as of the past week, that’s over.

The whole idea that we won the Cold War? Over.

Donald Trump is subordinate to taking orders from Vladimir Putin,” Rothkopf told host Joanna Coles.

“You know those stories that came out after World War II, that there was some Japanese guy and he was living on an island for 20 years and he thought the war was still going on and he was still fighting it? Well, here is this KGB guy, Vladimir Putin, who... still believes in the old Soviet Union, feels the end of the Soviet Union was the worst thing that ever happened in history.

He said that.