Donald Trump enjoyed hearing that he had drawn praise from the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the former US president and frontrunner for the 2024 Republican White House nomination has said.
Told during a recorded interview with Kristen Welker, the new NBC Meet the Press moderator, that Putin had fawned over his stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump replied: “I like that he said that. Because that means what I’m saying is right.”
Trump’s remarks to Welker – circulated by NBC on Friday to promote the interview with the ex-president, which is scheduled to air on Sunday morning – drew condemnation from some political quarters. In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the Republicans against Trump group shared a clip of the comments and wrote to its nearly half-million followers: “A vote for Trump is a vote against America.”
One of the overarching themes during Trump’s lone term in the Oval Office centered on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won.
Putin has endorsed Trump’s repeated boasts that he could bring Russia’s conflict with Ukraine to an end within a matter of hours if he were elected to a second term in the White House.
“Mr Trump says he will resolve all burning issues within several days, including the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin said at an economic forum in Russia recently. “We cannot help but feel happy about it.”
Trump’s boasts on that topic have earned him derision from his Republican and Democratic opponents, saying a conclusion to the conflict would require a surrender to demands from Putin, whose forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But, in his conversation with Welker, Trump doubled down on his position, saying he would simply get Putin and Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy “into a room and I would get a deal worked out”.
Asked by Welker for specifics on precisely how he would bring a swift conclusion to the war in Ukraine, Trump declined to answer, saying: “If I tell you exactly, I lose all my bargaining chips.”
“I mean, you can’t really say exactly what you’re going to do,” Trump told Welker, according to NBC. “But I would say certain things to Putin. I would say certain things to Zelenskiy.”
Welker noted to Trump that Russian bombs had destroyed maternity wards, and forces under Putin’s command had deliberately attacked civilians. Furthermore, the international criminal court (ICC) in the Hague in March issued an arrest warrant for Putin, accusing him of war crimes in connection with the abduction of Ukrainian children.
after newsletter promotion
“It’s all terrible,” Trump told Welker.
Trump has been facing more than 90 criminal charges across four separate indictments charging him with attempted subversion of the 2020 election that he lost to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, retention of classified information after his presidency and hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Civil cases he is grappling with include a $250m lawsuit by the New York attorney general about his business affairs as well as a defamation claim stemming from a rape accusation that a judge has deemed to be “substantially true”.
Trump nonetheless denies all wrongdoing and has sought to cast himself as the victim of political persecution. He also maintains substantial leads in national and key state polls regarding the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
