There are far too many coincidences within the campaign and staffing, his personal venture funding, and his attempted blackmail of Ukraine to just dismiss the Trump-Russia connection.
Trump would have been public enemy #1 for Russia. It's still leftover nonsense from the steele dossier hoax that caused this sort of thinking. It's extremely frustrating, and is an example of why fake news is so dangerous.
Attempting to blackmail Ukraine for his own political gains. Imagine they actually complied and were later found out. Even now Ukraine has to fight back against a reputation of corruption, and he was adding fuel to the fire.
For your example, the approach of denigrating European allies to get them to pay more fomented division. You might also recall he called for the US to withdraw from NATO.
When he still denied Russian activities relating to the election, despite the Mueller report and Senate investigation confirming it, all based on a chat with Putin.
When he held water for Putin's claim of Russia not shooting down MH-17 and instead muddied the waters with his doublespeak.
>Withdrawal from Syria.
He withdrew from Syria, and also started the withdrawal process from Afghanistan because he was vocally against engaging the US in forever wars. GOOD. That's hardly a position that supports Russia.
>The G7 invite.
Again trying to prevent global conflicts. He talked extensively about Russia as a threat to Europe. This is in alignment with his work on things like the Abraham accords (middle east peace) and the work he did on Korean peace deals (which he made massive progress on).
>Pulling out of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty.
I don't know anything about this, but pulling the US out of a treaty hardly seems like a legitimate concern unless you want to say the same thing about Obama literally just ignoring the agreement we had with Ukraine that would have obligated us to support them when Russia invaded in 2014.
Obama definitely wasn't a "Russian asset" for not starting a war over Ukraine.
>Attempting to blackmail Ukraine for his own political gains.
This is an absurd overstatement of what happened. Aid was never withheld from Ukraine (unlike the previous administration, which was also not run by Russian assets). Also: anti corruption efforts are hardly "his own political gains" unless you want to frame "anti corruption" as a strictly Trump-aligned idea.
>You might also recall he called for the US to withdraw from NATO.
Hardly. He said that if European countries weren't going to pay their legally obligated contributions to NATO, then the US wouldn't either. Obviously this is a bargaining technique to get them to uphold their obligations. I fail to see how negotiating to get European countries to increase their defense budgets explicitly to defend against Russia is aligned with Russian interests.
>When he still denied Russian activities relating to the election, despite the Mueller report and Senate investigation confirming it
Again I think you've been bitten by fake news here, and this highlights, again, the problem: what do you think "Russian activities relating to the election" were? Some memes on 4chan? A few thousand dollars worth of facebook ads?
>MH17
MH17 was shot down by Russia during Obama's term, and Obama did nothing. He also continued doing nothing while Russia invaded Ukraine, refusing to even send them weapons. Obama wasn't a Russian asset either.
Again: the entire idea of Trump as having anything to do with Russia came from a hoax. That was fake news, and it is still interfering with people's ability to make informed decisions about the US government. It's extremely frustrating.
I don't know what to say about your denial of the Ukraine blackmail. First you change my answer to being about whether the aid was held instead of the fact that he tried to pressure Ukraine into releasing information about his political opponent. Aside from that it was clear funding was held after the White House initially determined conditions were met. Mick Mulvaney even excused it as Trump being "not a big fan of foreign aid", and claimed Trump said Ukraine was a corrupt place (Oct. 17 2019 press briefing). It doesn't make sense to try and excuse it like this if no aid was withheld.
I don't know why bring up Obama as relating the MH-17. Trump's comments were after the investigation that concluded from Dutch authorities, and the conclusion of his own intelligence apparatus. We can write it off as just Trump's style to say words that only benefit a rival, but that just makes him to be rather incompetent as I said before. Still damning.
edit: I wrote incorrectly about the Dutch investigation time. That was concluded before the election, not during Trump's term.
Does what is actually true matter, at least plausibly, all things considered?
No he did not withhold military aid from Ukraine. In fact in the initial offensive, the javelin missiles that they were effectively using against Russian tanks came from the Trump administration. And in fact Trump was highly critical of the previous administration for "only sending blankets", which was something he was called a hawk for.
AND NOT ONLY THAT but one of the major points of Trump's presidency was criticizing European/NATO nations for not spending enough on their defense; specifically warning that Russia was going to use their dependence on Russian natgas, and lack of military spending, to Russia's advantage.
"Mulvaney added: "Did he also mention to me in the past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that's it. And that's why we held up the money."
ABC News' Jonathan Karl immediately followed up and asked Mulvaney to confirm that "the demand for an investigation into the Democrats was part of the reason that he ordered to withhold funding to Ukraine."
Mulvaney replied affirmatively, saying that "the look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation."
https://www.businessinsider.com/mick-mulvaney-confirms-trump...
You should be more careful of accusing people of falling for fake news when you are having such a hard time distinguishing fact from fiction.
"The inquiry reported that Trump withheld military aid[a] and an invitation to the White House to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in order to influence Ukraine to announce an investigation into Trump's political opponent Joe Biden"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impeachment_of_Donald_Tr...
As far as the impeachment, if you don't see this as nakedly partisan, then I would advise you to try and expand the perspectives you look at current events from.
That the outcome of the Senate trial was partisan has more to do with party politics. Republican Senators weren't on the floor arguing that Trump did the right thing. They intentionally worked to minimize how much of the trial was able to reach the news cycle because they also knew what occurred was wrong. The whole thing was over in 4 days and it was run on a weekend to minimize exposure. You might recall the upset over how the Senate even voted to not call witnesses.