RUSH: You know, folks, I’ve always said that I wanted to get older.  I have always been of the opinion that no matter how old I was that people older than I was had more freedom, had more success, were thus enjoying life more.  And it’s true.  I mean, there are other benefits to it now, though.  One of the real benefits — and this is something that you think is not gonna matter when you’re younger ’cause you think you know everything and whatever you learn from there on out is just gonna buttress what you already know.

However, there is nothing aside from aging, living more, getting older that can substitute for experience.  And so I am able to bring to you a unique perspective not found in most media, certainly not the Drive-By Media, anywhere where the practitioners of the art are under 35, maybe 40.  And what I’m talking about is the new onset panic over what appears to be a desired nuclear arms race by Donald Trump.

I am watching the history of the eighties begin to repeat itself.  For those of you that were not old enough in the eighties when Reagan was president, or for those of you not yet born, do not doubt me.  What is happening here as the result of one Trump comment on the nuclear arms race involving Putin and Sean Spicer, it is identical, the left is, to the way they were panicked and afraid and just basically unhinged back in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, the threat, according to the left, was Reagan.  Reagan was a dunce, an idiot, a cowboy, and he cracked jokes about bombing the Soviet Union, and he hated communism and he thought that it ought to be done away with. And so the learned people in our country and in the U.K. and what then became the European Union, all believed that the savior, the salvation, the lone hope to avoid a nuclear holocaust was whoever was running the Soviet Union.

And of course those guys kept dying.  And that led to the ascension to the Kremlin throne of Mikhail Gorbachev, and he literally became Christ-like to the left in terms of his lone ability to make sure that Reagan didn’t blow up the world.  We had Hollywood celebrity children that would go on the then Phil Donahue show and literally break down in hysterical tears telling everybody that they had no idea what it was like to grow up with the threat of nuclear holocaust hanging over them every day.

I remember one such program featuring Laura Dern and Phil Donahue trying to comfort her but the tears required 15 boxes of Kleenex.  And it’s all starting to repeat here.  It’s amazing.  And this is the benefit of my having worked in that period of time in this business, and have lived through it.  And thus am able to provide for you context and understanding and once again what we do best here, and that is dissect and break down the left, deconstruct liberalism, and explain to you what’s going on.

It is the big news of the day.  And we have to lift our ban on whatever happens at PMSNBC because that’s really where some of this began.  Sean Spicer is the new White House press secretary.  He was out there today, he was on MSNBC with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, whose father, by the way, was Zbig, Zbigniew Brzezinski.  He was the national security adviser for Jimmy Carter during Carter’s presidency.

Mika Brzezinski’s dad was the first person Jimmy Carter spoke to every day of his presidency.  Got the daily brief, but Zbig was in there.  Whenever Carter got to the Oval Office, Zbig was in there waiting.  He was this primo adviser on all the international stuff, the foreign policy and itinerant nuclear issues and so forth.  And what happened was that Spicer was talking about what Trump meant with his tweet about an arms race.

They went to a commercial break, and Trump called Spicer and said, “Put Mika the on phone.” So Spicer put Mika on the phone during a commercial break at MSNBC, and that’s when Trump said, “Let there be an arm’s race.”  And she about lost it.  She came back from the break panicked, and now the rest of the media today is in meltdown, because presidents are not supposed to call one person in a commercial break and talk to ’em, this isn’t how it’s done.

And the media all morning since this happened has been having roundtable discussions on how Spicer doesn’t know what he’s doing and Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. I was watching Judith Miller on Fox (paraphrasing), “We have a constitutional role, and I don’t care what he thinks, he just can’t erase it, he can’t wipe us out. So he better know, we’re gonna be here, he’s gonna be there, but he better know, we’re gonna be here.  I just can’t wait for this ’cause they can’t compete with this.

Folks, they are ticked off that Trump in a 140-character tweet can literally overwhelm and erase whatever they’re doing in 750 to a thousand words or however many they vomit on TV.

But we’ve got news besides that.  We have Joe Biden — it is amazing now that the Democrats have lost — oh, by the way, Putin not making any — he’s out there saying the Democrats were gonna lose and he knew the Democrats were gonna lose and that they deserved to lose, and Putin’s out there saying that they’re sore losers.  That’s got ’em even more ticked.  That Putin happens to like Trump.  That’s got ’em scared to death.

You ought to see Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight, the pollster guru.  He’s got a chart of the only people that would survive a nuclear blast.  It was one red state. (laughing)  I mean, this is hysteria.  Oops.  It’s impossible have everything within arm’s reach here.  Okay.  Headline: “Nate Silver’s Post-‘Nuclear Holocaust’ Electoral Map Goes Viral.”

This is too much fun!  You know, I’ve been through it.  That’s what I was trying to tell you, I’ve been through all of this.  Every liberal crackup there has been.  That liberal crackup on JetBlue yesterday with Ivanka Trump, it’s a liberal crackup.  Can you imagine if somebody had done that to Chelsea Clinton?  If Chelsea Clinton had deigned to fly coach and been on there with Marc Mezvinsky, can you imagine somebody getting on JetBlue and making a scene out of the fact that Chelsea was there, can you imagine what the media would be doing with that.

Oh, I shudder to.  Or if one of the Obama girls had been on the plane and somebody said, “What are they doing here?  I refuse to get on this airplane. Why don’t they get off.”  Can you imagine what the media would do with that.

“Nate Silver’s Post-‘Nuclear Holocaust’ Electoral Map Goes Viral.” (laughing)

So you know the liberals to whom Silver is godlike, they’re reading this, they’re posting it, they’re passing it around/ Drudge even has a story where it’s liberals who are stocking up on canned goods and nonperishable items ’cause they think we’re gonna die next week. Before climate change gets us, now nuclear warfare is gonna get us.

They are inconsolable.  They thought they had at least 30 years ’til climate change wiped us out.  Now it could be tomorrow because Trump wants a new nuclear arms race. Folks, I’m gonna put all this in perspective and I’m gonna explain to you how Trump has beaten Putin here in this.  Putin’s already backing down from this.  I’ll get to that in just a minute, but this is just too much fun.  There are actually two states, Mr. Snerdley, two states on the electoral map. “If only people who weren’t burnt to a crisp in the nuclear holocaust voted,” that is the title of the chart.

I’m so glad I didn’t take this week off.  I can’t tell you.  “Here’s what the electoral map would look like if only people who were not burnt to a crisp in the nuclear holocaust voted,” and the two states are red states.  They are Alaska and Wyoming, the only place voters would survive in a Trump nuclear war with Putin.  Phil Donahue may come out of retirement for this!  Vladimir Posner may come back from the Soviet Union and guest host with him.  There were a lot of people that got rich and really famous during the first nuclear arms race.  And they might be tempted to come back and do it all again.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  By the way, folks, let me make an observation to you.  Has the media once, have they once been concerned about a nuclear arms race with Iran?  They’ve not, have they?  I mean, the president of the United States has actually negotiated a deal that permits the state sponsor of terrorism, largest state sponsor of terrorism acknowledged by everybody in the world, Iran, to ramp up and get nuclear weapons.

Is the media, is the Democrat Party, anybody worried about that nuclear arms?  No way, because Obama’s involved and we don’t dare criticize Obama because Obama’s smarter than all the rest of us.  What Trump is doing is shutting down the expansion of nuclear weapons that Putin is engaging in because of Obama!  Obama has unilaterally chosen to disarm or reduce our nuclear arsenal without getting appropriate concessions from Putin or anybody else while ramping up the Iranian nuclear program.

I’ll explain this to you, but the upshot of this is that Putin has blinked in response to what Trump said about, “Let’s have an arms race” because Putin knows they lost the last one.  They can’t keep up with us.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, one of the reasons the media is so amped up today is what Sean Spicer said. He was on Fox News last night on the Megyn Kelly show without Megyn Kelly.  It was being host by Sandra Smith.  And Sean Spicer last night said that Trump is gonna hold the media accountable and he’s gonna correct the record.

Well, folks, you just don’t say that to the media.  It’s the media that’s going to hold Trump accountable.  It’s the media that is going to speak truth to power.  It is the media that’s gonna determine who gets good coverage and bad, and here comes Spicer, the new White House press secretary, and he says that Trump is gonna hold the media accountable and he’s going to correct the record.  So they are like everyone else on the left, they really don’t know what’s coming their way.  They’re starting to get an idea of it.  They don’t like it.

They still think they’re dealing with an idiot.  They still think they’re dealing with a boob.  They think they’re dealing with a dimwit that doesn’t know what he’s doing and they’re eventually gonna be able to outsmart him, and he is outsmarting them I can’t count how many times a day.  He’s running rings around them and they haven’t figured it out yet.  And they don’t know anything other than the current model that they’ve used and lived in for their entire lives.

The know inside-the-Beltway model. They know the establishment model. They know how the rules of the game are set up.  Elected officials defer to the media and do everything they can to make the media happy.  They grant access.  If the media rips ’em a new one, they just deal with it and move on and they try to be nicer to the media, and none of that applies. But they think that’s how the game is still played, that’s how the game should be played, and Trump had better, he had better play that way or we’re gonna destroy the guy.  They’re not saying that publicly, but this is what they’re planning.

What they haven’t recalled is that they’ve been trying to destroy Donald Trump for over a year and a half and they have not been able to do it.  They have no idea how to separate Trump’s base supporters from him.  They have no idea how to do it.  What they have forgotten is that they had nothing to do with making Trump popular, so they can’t destroy him.  The media can only break you if they make you, and the media has not made Donald Trump.  It’s quite the opposite.

Now, on this nuclear business.  I’m gonna give you the overall here and then we’re gonna double back and get into the detail of it.  Trump, Putin, and fake news.  Essentially what happened here, the New York Times, after being all excited, because thinking they were making inroads, Trump doing stupid things, like the Carrier deal is stupid, we shouldn’t make too big a deal out of that, and the Air Force One deal is stupid, the Lockheed deal scrapping the F-30, Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing.

By the way, have you ever heard — I didn’t mention this yesterday.  This Boeing cave-in on Air Force One, do you realize what the CEO — they’re gonna make two of them now for under four billion.  The original order was for one Air Force One at $4 billion, and after Trump got engaged on this and challenged the way Washington does things — the pay line, if you will, in Washington, Congress appropriates money after lobbyists are involved and after defense contractors are involved.

The cost of overall projects just escalates and escalates and escalates so that everybody who has had anything to do with somebody getting elected or staying elected gets a piece of the pie.  And this is how donors and lobbyists and others are paid back, is with your tax dollars.  Well, Trump is saying, “To heck with that.  I don’t want lobbyists.  Lobbyists are not gonna be part of what my administration does.  We’re not gonna do business the way we’ve always done it.  And so now we’re gonna get two brand-new Boeing 747-800s outfitted to be Air Force One for under $4 billion, two of them!”

Well, you might call it buy one, get one free, but it’s a far cry from the original deal, which was one of them for four billion and counting, and all it took, all it took was some push-back!  That’s all it took.  Doing what everybody else says,  “Well, we can’t do it that way.  I mean, this is the way we do it.  This is the budget process. This is the appropriations process. You can’t do it that way.”  And now it’s being demonstrated that of course it can be done a different way and much more sensibly.

So the New York Times, “Vladimir Putin, Unsurprised by Trump’s Remarks, Says Russia Wants No Nuclear Arms Race — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Friday that a statement by Donald J. Trump, the American president-elect, that the United States should expand its nuclear capabilities was not a surprise because he had said the same thing during the election campaign.”

Let’s go to the audio sound bites and put this in perspective. I gave you the end of story first, and that is Putin backing down.  You have to remember that in context here, Obama has been — you may not know this because the media has not really reported it.  But Obama has been steadily decreasing our nuclear arsenal.  At one time it was reported, but he has been unilaterally — he hasn’t been requiring any other nuclear state to downsize theirs.

In fact, that open mic incident following or just right before the 2012 presidential election where Barack Obama was caught talking to Dmitry Medvedev with the open mic and where he said (paraphrasing), “Look, tell Vlad I’ll have a lot more flexibility on this after I win reelection, I’ll have more flexibility after the election.”  Putin was pressuring Obama to make good on his promises to reduce our nuclear stock.  And Obama said, “You tell him be patient, I’ll have more flexibility after I win.”

Russia was not getting rid of theirs.  We were downsizing under the premise that our nuclear arsenal is what destabilizes the world because in Obama and the left’s view, it’s the United States which threatens all these other nations ’cause we’re so big and ’cause we’re a superpower, because we threaten them, the world is a different place.  He’s gonna downsize and make us less of a threat and all that.

So Trump has come in, after Putin made some comments and Trump, “Let’s have a nuclear arms race then, let’s have one.”  And the left in this country is just having a cow, but Putin, according to the New York Times, “Vladimir Putin, Unsurprised by Trump’s Remarks, Says Russia Wants No Nuclear Arms Race.” They lost the last one.  They lost the nuclear arms race in the eighties.

The last nuclear arms race is why the Berlin Wall fell.  The last nuclear arms race is why the Soviet Union imploded.  Communism, sadly, didn’t.  It was taken over by the militant environmentalist movement, but the Soviet Union as a communist citadel imploded.  And it was the nuclear arms race that did it because they couldn’t keep up.

And for those of you who weren’t around, when Reagan in 1981 introduced the concept of a missile shield, which the media dubbed Star Wars, when Reagan introduced that is when the Soviets began to panic, because they knew two things.  They knew that we could do it, because we, Americans, the United States, can do anything we set our mind to.  If we want a missile shield to take out nuclear weapons launched at us before they hit us, we can do it.

And Gorbachev, who was running the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, they knew the Russians — the Russians ray Third World nation with a First World military and nuclear arsenal.  And that’s the only thing that made ’em world players.  But they couldn’t feed their people. The department stores were empty. The big grocery stores were empty, everything went to the military in the old Soviet Union. They were imploding, and they couldn’t keep up.

And that exposed it.  It was Reagan and Star Wars.  It was the last nuclear arms race that exposed the Soviet Union as a paper Tiger.  They lost that one, Trump ramping up a new one, Putin knows they would lose another one.  Nobody can compete with us, particularly when we’re led by a can-do-anything kind of president rather than a president we’ve got now who thinks that whatever we do poses a problem in the world.  And that’s all this is.

But the left, it’s knee-jerk.  They hear nuclear, first stages of panic, and they start thinking they’re gonna be burnt to a crisp and they get Nate Silver writing stories about one state left after a nuclear holocaust, there only be two states with red states voters, and that would be Wyoming — I mean, silly stuff.  Then they start pondering the actual nuclear detonation and what would cause it.  And of course it’s gonna be our fault.  It will be Trump’s fault.  And then they panic, and they literally lose sanity, become unhinged, starting to see signs of it on this.

Meanwhile, while Obama is helping an actual terrorist state get nuclear weapons, there’s no panic and there’s no fear of any kind of an arms race where the Iranians are involved.  Why?  ‘Cause the media’s dumb!  They think with Obama involved everybody’s gonna be fine.  Everybody loves us.  The nukes respect Obama, the Iranians respect Obama, and so even if they get nukes, ’cause there’s so much respect for Obama they would never launch an attack.  It’s stupid!

So the imaginary nuclear arms race which is not going to happen, is the key. It’s like, why do you build the B-2 stealth bomber?  So that you never have to use it.  Why do you build all these advanced weapons?  So you never have to use it.  The left cannot understand that thinking.  It’s called deterrence.  You build up a military that makes it obvious to any would-be attacker that they can’t survive the attack.

That’s always been our defense posture when we’re led by responsible, reasonable people.  When we’re led by people who think we’re the problem in the world we don’t get that kind of attitude.  We get a very defensive attitude. What Obama thinks is the way to reduce the threat is to let everybody have nukes, that would make it fair, and that would reduce the tensions that we cause by being a superpower.  It’s dumb!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, folks, back to what I had promised an hour ago.  And that is this whole thing of the nuclear arms race that Trump says, “Let’s have one, let’s have one.”  And the left now quaking in their boots in fear.  This starts with the naming of Sean Spicer as the White House press secretary.  He has been the spokesman for the Republican National Committee most recently, and he was on Fox News last night on The Kelly File, but Kelly wasn’t there filing.  It was Sandra Smith filing on The Kelly File.

Sean Spicer said in an exclusive interview that Donald Trump is going to hold the media accountable, and Donald Trump is going to correct the record.  Spicer says Trump is unique among politicians because he’s not having to put everything through the filter of the mainstream media.  He says it’s absolutely fascinating, it makes every day, every hour just unbelievable because you never know what’s going to happen. You know you’re having that conversation with the American people, and they can have it back with him.

And by virtue of this, we are not needing the media.  We are edging the media out.  We’re going to go over the heads of the media, but when he said we are gonna hold the media accountable, that’s when they started having cows and kittens and everything else.  Because in their world, they hold people accountable.  It’s not the other way around.  And what Spicer’s talking about here is Trump’s tweeting.  And I think he makes a great point.  It’s Trump’s way of having a conversation with everyday Americans.  It’s Trump’s way of letting everyday Americans know what he thinks.

You know, when Bush didn’t have a press conference every other day the media was just beside themselves being critical.  “Don’t you think you need to address the American people and let us question you so the American people find out what’s on your mind?”  And Obama goes all these days without one, they don’t care. Hillary goes almost a year and a half without one, they don’t care.  Now Trump is letting the American people know what he thinks four or five times a day, and they can’t deal with it.

So this takes us to MSNBC this morning.  We are up to audio sound bite number five.  Sean Spicer, after having been on the Kelly file last night, then goes over to MSNBC, and they end the segment.  They’re talking about all this media stuff and Spicer’s comments about how Trump’s gonna hold the media accountable.  They go to a break, and during the break, Trump called Spicer.  Trump is watching.  Trump is one of the five people that watches MSNBC.

So he was watching this, and he saw Spicer on there, and he saw what happened, and he called Spicer and wanted to talk to Mika Brzezinski, the cohost, during the commercial break.  This just isn’t done.  So Spicer put her on the phone during the commercial break.  After the break is over and they come back to the program, Scarborough and Brzezinski have this little exchange.

SCARBOROUGH:  Sean Spicer —

BRZEZINSKI:  He just left, but he was on the phone with Donald.

SCARBOROUGH:  — with the president-elect, Mika asks the president elected while we had the opportunity, what his position was on trying to clarify the tweet yesterday regarding the nuclear arsenal and the president-elect told you what?

BRZEZINSKI:  Let it be an arms race.  We will outmatch them at every pass.

SCARBOROUGH:  And outlast them all.

BRZEZINSKI:  And outlast them all.

SCARBOROUGH:  All right, you can put that down as breaking news.

BRZEZINSKI:  There you go.

RUSH:  There you go.  And this just caused panic throughout the media.  Up next is Spicer over on the Today show, and he’s being interviewed by Matt Lauer, and Matt Lauer said, “This president is gonna reverse 40 years of policy in this country where presidents since Reagan pledged to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and warheads we have?”

SPICER:  We’re not gonna sit back, Matt, and watch other nations threaten our safety.  If another country wants to expand their nuclear capability, the U.S. is not gonna sit back and idly by.  But just to be clear, the president isn’t saying we’re going to do this. He said unless they come to their senses.  It’s a warning to them that this president’s going to take action.

RUSH:  Exactly right.  So Putin’s out there, what Putin does, he huffs and puffs and so forth, and in the midst of congratulating Trump and talking about how the Democrats are sore losers, you know, Putin starts huffing and puffing about the Soviet Union, well, Russia reviving and starts talking about weapons and Putin has been flying bear bombers and otherwise other military aircraft very close to U.S. borders for quite a while now. And Trump said, “Okay, let’s have an arms race.  You want an arms race, let’s have an arms race.”  Putin backed down immediately, which is the point, and what Spicer is saying, that he was issuing a warning!

See, the left does not communicate this way.  The left, don’t forget, they come out of conflict convolution 101.  They come out of wringing their hands and political correctness where you never say anything to offend anybody, and you don’t taunt, I mean, that’s childish, you don’t taunt, you don’t make fun of, you don’t do any of that.  They come from a very cocoon-like world where the way people really talk to each other gets penalized.

And so Trump is the president of the most powerful nation in the world, and he says to Putin who thinks that he’s gonna be the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, Russia, Trump said, “You want to have an arms race?  Well, let’s have an arms race.”  Meaning, you don’t have a chance, Vlad.  We already decked you once in this regard, and that’s why you lost the Soviet Union.  You want to do it again, we’ll be glad to do it again.  It’s a warning.

Spicer is exactly right.  The left does not recognize this kind of talk except in western movies, which they hate.  They think western movies and cowboy kind of stuff, that’s why they insult Bush by calling him a cowboy, insulted Reagan by calling him a cowboy, ’cause this is how cowboys talk. It’s how gunslingers talk. This is how guys that do duels talk. This is how guys that wear guns around their belt and pull guns out and start shooting, it’s horrible.

These are people that want to get rid of guns, and here’s Trump, “You want an arms race?  Bring it on, dude, let’s have an arms race.”  And they think, because they’re so sheltered and because they come from a world of political correct that they really think that Trump now is promising and committing to one, rather than issuing a warning.  So Spicer makes it clear to Matt Lauer but Matt Lauer is not getting it.

LAUER:  He doubled down this morning, Sean, speaking to Mika Brzezinski, he was asked about this, and he said, I’m paraphrasing here, “Let there be an arms race.  If this is the result, let there be an arms race.  We will match them at every turn.”

SPICER: He’s sending a very —

LAUER: He truly is preparing for an arms race?

SPICER:  Look, since he was elected November 8, he has had one success after another. With Carrier, with Boeing —

LAUER:  This is very different.

SPICER:  Hold on, hold on.

LAUER:  This is nuclear proliferation.

SPICER:  I understand that, but other countries need to be put on notice that he is not gonna sit back and allow them to undermine our safety, our sovereignty.  He is going to match other countries and take action.

RUSH:  Now, one thing you have to know or keep in mind as you listen to these is that in minds like Matt Lauer’s or Mika Brzezinski, Putin is not the enemy, Trump is. Trump is the enemy, the American nuclear arsenal is the problem, we have to reduce it so that we don’t threaten these other people.  It is because we’re so big and threaten these other people that they do terrorism, that they have their own nukes; it’s all our fault.

That’s from the Democrat Party standard operating manual procedure.  And they believe this my whole life.  It’s the American people’s fault, it’s United States’ fault for being a superpower.  That is the unstable destabilizing element in the world.  We have to be cut down to size.  So when Putin ramps up, they understand it.  When Putin wants to increase his arsenal, they understand it because, well, he’s gotta stay even with us. I mean, it’s only fair, and that’s why Obama was talking about Iran getting nukes.

Well, who are we to tell them they can’t have them?  I mean, we’ve got ’em, and nobody told us we can’t have ’em so who are we?  So the left has this really — do not doubt me on this — really convoluted view of the world and the United States’ role in it, and they really think that we’re the problem and that our size and our military might and our economic might threatens all these other people. And that if we weren’t this big and powerful these other people wouldn’t be as mean as they are, they wouldn’t be as aggressive.

So it’s only understandable that Putin would want nukes and it’s understandable that Iran would, but we should be getting rid of ours.  That’s how to deal with the threat, according to these pansies.  Well, Trump is not a pansy.  And if Putin’s gonna start huffing and puffing about it Trump’s, “You want an arms race, bud?  Fine, be glad to get into one with you, if that’s what you want.”

I’m looking for a way to describe this that is not — the left just doesn’t get it.  I know exactly what I want to say but I don’t want reaction to me to cloud your understanding of this.  Well, Snerdley’s urging me on here, just say it, right?  No, because it’s gonna be totally lied about and misrepresented and they’re gonna turn it into something totally irrelevant to what I’m talking about.

Suffice it to say that Putin ramping up nukes, the Iranians, fine.  We understand it, we’re so big we threaten them.  They’ve got to take steps to protect themselves.  Therefore the burden is on us to make the world safe by getting rid of that which threatens these people.  They have no concept of the fact that Putin’s a bad guy, except for the fact he’s a bad guy now because he got involved in the campaign.  Before this, Obama and Putin were buddy-buddy, and the media thought it was cool,but now since Putin is reputed to have screwed Hillary in the election, not literally, now they hate Putin.  They’ve never been bothered by the Iranians getting nukes because they think it’s totally understandable.  I’m telling you, folks, they’re children.  They are dangerous children.  These people being in power, people like Obama or Hillary or Matt Lauer, the way these people think, it’s bad for us.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This nuke stuff with Putin, it all got started because Putin yesterday called for Russia to reinforce its military nuclear potential.  Putin got this started by saying we’re ramping up, and that’s what Trump was reacting to.  The left is so off base about this.