The movie industry would be stuck without making gangsters in the Russian mafia the primary villains in many action thrillers. It’s one of the most recurring tropes.

Perhaps similarly, the Democrats and their media enablers (or vice versa) and the unhinged Never Trump Republicans would be lost without the tedious Russian-collusion narrative.

It’s ironic, isn’t it how the media and political ridiculed Mitt Romney unmercifully when he warned about Russia’s intentions. Remember, too, that Obama was caught on a hot mic in March 2012 telling then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility”  on policy issues after the election. And then there was Hillary Clinton’s Russian “reset.”

President Trump could have been more precise in his statements about Russian meddling in the 2016 election during the Helsinki press conference, which is different from unproven collusion allegations.

The outrage from the blue-check Twitter cohort seemed to be prepackaged, however, as it was after the Singapore meeting with Kim Jong Un. Trump tried to clean thing today, but his foes locked in to the Russia narrative will never be satisfied.

As Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post, “In short, most people played to type, as if following a script. Indeed, it reminded me of the 2016 campaign, where Trump would say something outrageous and it looked for all the world that his candidacy would be dead in 24 hours. Many people, to judge from their overreactions in the last 24 hours, haven’t learned anything.”

In September 2016, journalist Selena Zito famously wrote in The Atlantic in reference to the skeptical media’s fact-checking Trump’s claims (something that Obama was never subjected to), ” the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Obviously Putin is a dictator whose regime is engaged in many forms of wrongdoing. But Trump’s critics, for example, seem unconcerned about the activities of China, with its ever-expanding worldwide economic, military, political and espionage activities, including hacking the U.S. government in 2015. And they were cheerleaders for the flawed nuclear deal with Iran, a country that is formally designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Can you blame Trump for being less than thrilled with intelligence agencies, given how the so-called Deep State has tried to undermine his presidency, including obtaining FISA warrants to spy on his campaign essentially under false pretenses? Plus, how special counsel Mueller loaded up his prosecutorial team with Democrats with ties to Obama and Clinton.

Remember the good old days when liberals and leftists distrusted and denounced the CIA and other spy agencies and accused them of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries?

So for decades, liberals expressed skepticism about the intelligence apparatus. When Trump expresses skepticism, suddenly that becomes a traitorous act?

From the New York Times:

“Loch K. Johnson, the dean of American intelligence scholars, who began his career in the 1970s investigating the C.I.A. as a staff member of the Senate’s Church Committee, says Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades, whenever American officials were worried about a foreign vote.

“‘We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,’ said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. ‘We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.’

“The United States’ departure from democratic ideals sometimes went much further. The C.I.A. helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia.”

More recently, Obama meddled in the 2015 Israeli elections when he sent his operatives to try to help defeat Prime Minister Netanyahu.

In the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, most Democrats were AWOL. And there are reports that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy allegedly “enlisted the help of the Kremlin in attempting to take down” President Ronald Reagan.

The larger point is that Trump’s foes consistently claimed that he would start a nuclear war;  now they’re accusing him of treason by trying to achieve peace.

For the vast majority of us who aren’t policy wonks and are bored with tawdry Beltway infighting, which is it?

A fan of the president’s persuasion skills, Dilbert creator Scott Adams has implied that Trump is trying to create a new reality for Putin and Kim — who control nuclear arsenals — that will lead to less international tension. If this is accurate, it’s a nuance that has totally escaped the political and media class which is afflicted with Trump Derangement syndrome and seem to be hell-bent on increasing tensions with Russia.

According to CNBC, “some of the toughest sanctions in years have fallen on Russia’s elite under the Trump administration.”

Cynics might argue that the only proven collusion so far was that Hillary Clinton was part of a government committee that gave Russia 20 percent of U.S. uranium while big bucks poured into the Clinton Foundation and that Clinton and the Democrats paid millions to a ex-British spy with Kremlin contacts for that disputed dossier that was the pretext for warrants enabling the FBI to conduct surveillance on the Trump campaign.

While a bitter adversary during the campaign, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul has come to Trump’s defense after the controversy du jour.

Parenthetically, some of Trump’s most strident foes have accused  him of being a fascist. If so, he’s perhaps the most incompetent authoritarian ever. No would-be dictator would permit the major news networks, Hollywood, Saturday Night Live,  and numerous other platforms and virtue-signaling individuals to trash him 24/7. In fact, it’s a resume enhancer and career booster to bash Trump in the most profane terms even as the president’s economic nationalism agenda appears to be a major success for all Americans.

Added: Breitbart‘s John Nolte takes it one step further.

“What the media wanted was to emotionally blackmail Trump into creating an international scene, a YouTube moment with Putin, where the president would violate every diplomatic norm to publicly shame and berate the Russian president…Wisely, for the good of his country and out respect for the truth, Trump refused to jump in the trap. And now the spoiled children who once again did not get what they want, are having a national tantrum….

“Nevertheless, what really happened is this: Trump showed the gangster Putin that he is his own man, that he cannot be bullied by America’s corrupt political and media establishment into behaving in a certain way, that he is willing to take those flaming arrows to do what he thinks is right, which, in this case, is to never forget the lessons of Iraq.

“Keep in mind that what Trump was supposed to do Monday was to drink the Kool-Aid, was to believe our Intelligence Community (IC) got it 100 percent right about Russian meddling, was to throw diplomacy out the window and publicly embarrass Putin…What is so incredible is that, in this the year 2018, after the intelligence catastrophe that was Iraq, after learning the IC was actively meddling in the 2016 election using Kremlin-fed propaganda in the form of a dossier, only a crazy man would swallow whole what the IC is telling him, and only a dangerously weak man would risk damaging relations with Russia further in order to symbolically appease the IC…

“Trump’s actions speak for themselves. His actions, not his words when engaged in direct diplomacy, which of course require a certain amount of finesse and BS, are what matter.

“It is simply a fact that Trump has been tougher on Russia than both his predecessors combined. He has increased Russian sanctions, directed many of those sanctions directly at Putin’s inner circle, has drawn a real red line in Putin’s client state of Syria, twice bombed Putin’s client Assad, is openly admonishing Germany for being Putin’s energy client, overturned Obama’s appeasement of Putin by giving Poland anti-missile defense, ordered Russian diplomatic properties closed in D.C., Manhattan, Seattle, and San Francisco; Trump has armed Ukraine and is aggressively pushing our NATO partners to invest even more into an organization built specifically to defy Russia.”

More much-needed sanity from Rand Paul, in the first clip with Deep State spokesman Wolf Blitzer who apparently moonlights as a CNN anchor: