Americans should not worry that President-elect Donald Trump is cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin because they won't be "lovey-dovey" for long, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy tells Newsmax TV.
"They may be all lovey-dovey now and there's a lot of batting eyelashes between Putin and Trump, but come two weeks from now Trump is going to be president," McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, said Thursday to Steve Malzberg on "America Talks Live."
"He's going to instantly be at loggerheads with what Mitt Romney was correct to say is the regime that's our biggest, most problematic geopolitical enemy."
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McCarthy said he can't get too worked up over Trump's occasional praise of Putin because the billionaire real-estate tycoon "has blown hot and cold on almost everybody who has been prominent in the news throughout the campaign.
"He loved [Sen. Ted] Cruz until he didn't. He loved [Sen. Marco] Rubio until he didn't. Two days ago he liked [Sen.] Chuck Schumer. Yesterday the latest tweet was that the Democrats in the Senate were Schumer's clowns.
"I'm betting that it ain't going to be lovey-dovey for so long [between Trump and Putin]. Everything we know about Trump tells us that."
McCarthy, who served as an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Putin runs Russia like a "Mafia don'' and the sensible way to view him is as a leader who "wants leverage against whoever wins."
"We should start from the premise that Russia and Putin in particular is an enemy of the United States," he said.
McCarthy, a National Review contributing editor, is the author of "Faithless Execution," published by Encounter.