Whether he does or does not, there’s no denying Trump’s man-crush on Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and attacking everybody else over something he said doesn’t make Trump look like an innocent victim.

I don't know Putin, have no deals in Russia, and the haters are going crazy – yet Obama can make a deal with Iran, #1 in terror, no problem!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 7, 2017

Except many on the right had a lot to say about Obama’s misguided deal with Iran. Has he forgotten the rally he attended with Ted Cruz during the primaries, specifically designed to speak out against the Iran deal?

All that came to a head because of a snippet from a Sunday night interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly was released, showing Trump drawing a moral equivalency between what Putin does and America.

From the Hill:

Trump during an interview with Bill O’Reilly shot back when the Fox News host asserted that Putin is “a killer.”

“There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?” Trump responded.

The comment has forced Republican leaders to answer for the Trump administration, and to defend the GOP, in general.

VP Pence was sent out on the Sunday morning shows to try and Trumpsplain the comment, saying that what the people heard wasn’t the same as a moral equivalency.

Poor Pence. He will be one of several in the administration whose appearances for the next four years will begin with the line, “What he meant to say was…”

Republican lawmakers, meantime, including Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) have disputed Trump’s comparison between the U.S. and Russia.

“I don’t know what the president’s trying to do with statements like he allegedly has on O’Reilly on the Super Bowl tonight,” Sasse told ABC’s “This Week.”

“There is no moral equivalency there,” he later added.

Senator Rubio tweeted out this response:

When has a Democratic political activists been poisoned by the GOP, or vice versa? We are not the same as #Putin. MR

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 5, 2017

And he’s right.

Trump is going to have to learn that words have meaning, and what he said very clearly placed America and Russia on the same moral level.

We just got through eight years of a leader who did not love this country.

The last thing we need is a leader who says he loves us out of one side of his mouth, while drawing parallels between us and a murderous despot out of the other.