The Roosevelt & Truman administrations handed Stalin actual US treasury currency plates with which he could counterfeit American currency. They allowed his spies to carry classified information out of the country in diplomatic pouches and supplied the Soviet leadership with personal luxury goods under the cover of military aid, as well as technology that had little to no wartime applications.

They handed over half of Europe to Stalin and plotted to conceal it from the American people for the purposes of electoral success, they disarmed Chinese resistance to Soviet-backed troops, handed over parts of eastern Asia to the USSR in return for unnecessary military aid against a nation that was begging to surrender. They ignored all warnings and efforts at security to allow Stalin access to nuclear technology, and protected Soviet agents, informants and sympathizers in the highest ranks of the US government.

They used firehoses to force onto transport ships, prisoners who had never been Soviet citizens or subjects, because Stalin wanted revenge on them. They threw refugees from Stalin's genocide, tyranny, political purges and leveling sprees back into his maw, and bragged about what good friends they were.

All of Trump's praise of Putin sounds like a cold-shoulder next to FDR's effusive flattery.

Putin is not, and never has been the enemy of any vital US interest. It was the US that broke an informal agreement with Russia after the fall of the USSR to not expand NATO, and promptly ran the alliance right up to Russia's doorstep. We were the ones who intervened in a civil war in Syria, giving aid & support to enemies of Putin's ally. It was Bush, public Hillary supporter, who broke a thirty year old ABM treaty and it was US support that helped the Ukrainian regime change. By contrast Putin's seizure of Crimea was merely reclaiming lands that had always been Russian and which were alienated to Ukraine by the Soviets, and with relatively little bloodshed compared to what we have caused in the Middle East & Balkans over the four administrations prior to Trump.

And if unwitting open-mike comments are an ironclad indicator of a President's intentions and actions, and amicable words to post-Soviet Russian leaders are treason, what about Obama's comments to Medvedev that he'd be able to cooperate more after his reelection, when he no longer had to answer to the American people?

Remember, those same people elected Trump over Clinton, whose disparity in attitudes toward Russia were so extreme and blatant that their legislature supposedly broke into spontaneous applause at the news of his win. Maybe it's time for the government of, by and for the People to stop fucking around with stuff that doesn't concern us lest we follow the lead of other leaders of great powers. Churchill once talked about Cromwell's biggest mistake being his fixation on Spain to the point where he missed the rise of France as his country's new rival and those comments were in a context suggest he had made the same mistake his whole career with Germany and the USSR in the respective place of Spain & France. Maybe we're doing the same with with Russia and China. If we REALLY have to be number one great power, isn't Russia a natural ally against the threat of China? Britain ended the Great Game in order to bring Russia into the fold against Germany, and spent half a century under the threat of Russian nuclear annihilation, to the point of joining a formal alliance with Germany. And now they are trying to shake loose of the tarpit that alliance drew them into. Geopolitical facts change. If it is, in fact, time to change the relationship with Russia, isn't that Trump's prerogative? Are some nice words really supposed to matter more than his berating the nations of Europe for not spending more for defense against Russia?