Chris Matthews Blasts Trump’s ‘Weird Love’ for ‘Our Enemies’: ‘180 Craziness!’

Chris Matthews unleashed on what he said was President Donald Trump’s “weird love” for “our enemies” – an infatuation he insisted the American people don’t share – and for warping decades of U.S. foreign policy in a way that is giving opportunity to rival powers like Russia and China.

The takedown came on Tuesday’s Morning Joe as the team discussed Trump’s heated exchanges with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who he accused of starting the war and has framed as a dictator.

Host Mika Brzezinski noted that Zelensky had made a “painful” admission that he believed the people of the U.S. were with him, but was not so sure about the administration. She added that despite the insistence of Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff that Russia wants peace, no ceasefire has materialized.

“Do you think, politically, Americans will side with Putin as well if Trump does?” Brzezinski asked the panel.

Matthews replied with a flat “no” and opened up on Trump’s policy approach as “180 craziness” and fumed that he could not understand why the president “refuses to see” how he’s being played:

I think the American people find Ukraine today very much like Britain back in the 1930s and 1940s. We see them as the democracy fighting for itself against a tyrannical challenger, an aggressor nation. The Soviets, the former Soviets, now the Russians I think they’re still nationalists see themselves as [having] the right to rebuild their empire.

You know, if you look around the world, we attack our most friendly country in the world, Canada. We attacked Vietnam, which has become one of our friendliest nations in the world. If you go to Vietnam, I’ve been going there every year to teach. And I have to tell you, it’s so pro-American and fearful of China. And what happened today? Xi, President Xi of China is in Vietnam trying to coax his way back to a friendship with them.

We are taking friends and turning them into enemies. We’re turning enemies and making them into friends. It is all 180 craziness in the world. We lash out at our best friends, our people who are becoming our best friends since the Vietnam war.

Brzezinski let out an audible and despairing sigh but Matthews continued:

And certainly with Canada, nobody in America has any animus towards Canada. There is none in America, anywhere. No one has a problem with Canada. And so we fight with our best friends that we go visit over there, and we sometimes get confused. ‘Oh, we’re not in our country. No, we’re in Canada, a friendly country.’

And we go to Russia. Nobody thinks Russia is on our side! Nobody thinks North Korea is on our side, or Iran or China. We know who our enemies are, they’re geopolitical. They’re obvious. They’re factual.

But Trump has this weird love of Hungary, of Russia, of North Korea. And in the strangest way, he wants to make friends with our enemies. What is he up to? I don’t have any conspiracy theories, but I do not get it. I do not get what this guy’s love of Russia particularly is. And to always be always forgiving them.

Pivoting to Witkoff, Matthews unloaded on his diplomatic efforts:

We have Witkoff, who seems like a serious guy, a serious negotiator over there trying to find out what is their problem with peace. Their problem with peace is it doesn’t expand the former Soviet empire. It doesn’t include Belarus and it doesn’t threaten Poland. And it’s not going to take Crimea and all those countries, they want more land. This is the old Russian land grab. They want more land. This is what’s going on. And Trump refuses to see it.

Watch above via MSNBC.