President Donald Trump's communication team fronted by former Fox News executive Bill Shine is to blame for the disastrous reaction to his meeting with Vladimir Putin, former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay told Newsmax TV on Tuesday.
DeLay said the "liberal media" had been gearing up to pounce on Trump – and his communications team should have known that and been better prepared for the summit with the Russian president in Helsinki.
"This was a mistake, but it was a communications mistake," DeLay, a Texas Republican, told Tuesday's "America Talks Live." "They should have known, and I'm sure they did, because for the last two weeks the liberal media has been setting him up for this.
"I've never seen such an attack on a president . . . going into a meeting on the international stage. They attacked him on NATO, they attacked him with his trip to London, they were calling on him not to meet with Putin. They were setting him up.
"Politics should stop at the edge of the nation, and maybe they don't have to support the president, but at the very least don't set him up."
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He called several "gotcha" questions asked of Trump "nothing but straight out of the Democratic playbook."
"So . . . their communications operation should have been better prepared; the president should have been prepared to take on gotcha questions," DeLay said. "I mean, he gets them all the time. I just think he was off his game, and it was bad communications.
"But we need to look deeper at the substance of what happened here, and I think he did a good job."
Asked by co-host John Cardillo whether Shine, who accompanied Trump to Finland, should take the blame, DeLay was not sure.
"I don't know what's going on – he's just taken over the communications operation," he said.
Shine was named Trump's deputy chief of staff for communications this month after being pushed from Fox News in May 2017 for his handling of sexual harassment scandals at the network.
DeLay also advised Trump to take a more adversarial view toward Putin.
"Establish the fact, and you can do it in a polite way, but establish the fact that Putin is a thug and . . . is putting America's national security interests in jeopardy, and the only way that he could see not going to war – to fix that – is to start opening dialogue with Putin," DeLay said.
"[Trump] needed to be able to explain that before he went to the meeting, and he never really did."
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