Bestie Bailout: Trump Gives a Helping Hand to Putin and the Finger to Congress

There are endless studies showing that having friends is important. Here, for example, is what the Mayo Clinic has to say on the subject — and those guys really know their stuff; just look at how they absolutely nailed the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder.

And, if you belong to the roughly half of Americans who don’t believe in highfalutin experts, take it from the one source you trust: Donald Trump.

A few years ago, the president mused about the importance of friendship in a birthday card he sent to his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

“A pal is a wonderful thing,” Trump wrote back then.

He is right, of course. A friend is someone who always has your back. Maybe, like Trump and Epstein, they share a hobby or some “wonderful secrets” that one of them then tries to protect when he is in the White House.

Or, let’s say one of these pals wants to become president of the United States. Then, obviously, the other will help him out, for example with an army of bots and a hacking attack on his opponent.

That’s what friends are for.

Of course, being there for each other is not a one-way street, which is why one favor often begets another.

And that brings us to Friday night, which is the time of the week when governments release the kind of information that they would rather the public not hear a lot out about.

Specifically, it’s when Trump signed another document.

This time, it wasn’t a birthday card in the shape of a young woman with his signature symbolizing her pubic hair. Instead, it was an executive order that was equally gross, just in a completely different way.

With the stroke of a pen, the president exempted Russia from the sanctions detailed in a bill that Congress passed last month specifically to punish the regime of Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine and waging war against its civilian population.

By the way, the legislation Trump invalidated by invoking unspecified “national interests” (and which was scheduled to go into effect on Sunday) was supposed to be the legacy of another one of the president’s pals – the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

But some bonds just go deeper than mere political alliances, sycophancy, and a few rounds of golf.

Like whatever it is that has made Trump Putin’s lap dog.

There is, however, an upside to all of this.

With Americans heading to the polls for the midterms, the cards are now all on the table.

Thanks to this executive order, as well as the diesel deal Trump struck with Putin and the US withholding life-saving intelligence from Ukraine this week, there is no more denying what most of the world already knew: In this conflict, the president is siding with the aggressor — a murderous dictator and war criminal.

And it is also clear that a Republican-led Congress won’t do anything about that, even if there will be some hand-wringing in the next couple of days.

Fortunately, the American people will have an opportunity to do something about that between now and November 3.

Our friendly reminder to them is to not let this one go to waste.