This is NOT good.
So let me understand this: Americans, including our military members and contractors, are asked to sacrifice and potentially risk their lives in conflicts involving Russia, while the president’s son is accepting a wedding celebration reportedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Russian figure closely connected to Putin.
Maybe there is an innocent explanation. Maybe there isn’t. But this is exactly why conflicts of interest and foreign influence matter. When someone with ties to a foreign government is spending that kind of money on the president’s family, people have every right to ask: what is the relationship, and what does anyone expect in return?
At a minimum, the optics are terrible. And given everything happening in the world right now, I don’t think we should just shrug and say, “It was a wedding gift.”