Trump's agenda is to get out of entangling alliances dating back to the Cold War and beyond. It was a great American president that said "Commerce with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Trump likes the sound of that and apparently so do enough voters who listened to him say that we need to step out of the Cold War with Russia and try to find common ground or else they're just going to sidle up to the Chinese and then we've got two major superpowers - both of whom are not Western - gunning for us. Do we want that? Do we need to hate Russia? We propped up dictators and autocratic regimes for decades yet Putin is just way too horrible for us to let him run his country in his way while cooperating with us on issues that are of concern to us. Anti-Trumpers seems to think it is horrible that Russia's feels it horrible that it's former Soviet block nations have joined and seek to join NATO and the West. How would we feel if we lost a long, drawn-out war and then watched our enemy gather up all of our prized pieces that made up our empire? That's how Russians feel and that's why Putin is popular in Russia. Russians have been a beaten and unfortunate people for over a century and they feel that Putin will make them great again. So let him. As long as he doesn't imperile us, then let him do his thing and use the Russians to keep both terrorism and the rise of China in check