Donald Trump is a big fan of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Big fan. Huge fan. Earlier this week, Putin praised Trump as “a very outstanding man, unquestionably talented,” and Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Trump gladly accepted and reciprocated Putin’s admiring remarks because he’s a an amoral dolt who assesses people based largely on whether they say nice things about him.

Trump’s bonhomie with the Russian leader led to this exchange, in which host Joe Scarborough pointed out that Trump superfan Vladimir Putin “kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries,” to which Trump replied: “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”

Trump eventually did say, after repeated inquiries, that he condemns the killing of journalists and political adversaries, but he’s taking it on the chin from the commentariat for saying that Putin – murdering and invading notwithstanding – is a strong leader, unlike President Barack Obama. It’s a morally repugnant position to take, and it’s not too far removed from what elite conservative pundits and Republican politicians have been saying about Putin and Obama for years.

There’s been a long-running streak of right-wing admiration for the Russian president, whose authoritarian tendencies and expansionist policies are contrasted favorably with those of Obama, whom conservatives view as terminally weak and constantly outmatched by Putin’s strategic genius and strong leadership. “Putin is playing chess and I think we’re playing marbles,” House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers quipped on Fox News Sunday last March, as Putin was annexing the Crimean peninsula. “They’ve been running circles around us.” This is a common trope, especially among neoconservatives, who cast every aggressive foreign policy move by Putin as a strategic victory over Obama. “Putin is delivering one more finger in the eye of a president whom he continues to out-wit and out-muscle,” Washington Post blogger wrote in October after Russia moved to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war. (The Russians’ Syria campaign is actually looking more and more like a strategic blunder.)