It’s no secret that Donald Trump is a huge fan of dictators, and that one dictator in particular has his heart. We speak, of course, of Vladimir Putin (though Kim Jong Un is certainly getting flowers and candy on Valentine’s Day too). As president of the United States, Trump sided with Putin over his own intelligence officials. He has an endless supply of good things to say about the Russian authoritarian, having called him a “genius” and “savvy” for invading Ukraine. He has defended Putin over (credible) accusations that the Russian president has had journalists and dissidents murdered. He has openly called on Putin to help him take down Joe Biden. Should he win another term in office, many fear he will cut off support to Ukraine, and let Russia take over. And according to a new report, he has kept in very, very close touch with his favorite despot in recent years.
The New York Times reports that in a new book—War, out next week—veteran journalist Bob Woodward reveals that Trump “has secretly spoken with President Vladimir V. Putin…as many as seven times since leaving office, even as he was pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight Russian invaders.” In one scene, Woodward writes that in early 2024, the ex-president ordered an aide to leave his office at Mar-a-Lago so he could speak with Putin by phone. That aide, according to Woodward, estimates that Trump and Putin might have spoken on half a dozen other occasions since Trump left the White House in 2021.
As the Times notes, “former presidents meet with foreign counterparts after leaving office from time to time,” and Trump has hosted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban at Mar-a-Lago. But those meetings were not a secret, and “it would be highly unusual for a former president to privately talk with a top American adversary like Mr. Putin without clearing it with the current administration—especially at a time when the United States and Russia are on opposite sides of a war in Europe.” On the other hand, Trump does a lot of things that are “highly unusual,” like trying to steal a second term in office after losing an election.
And speaking of unusual:
The book also reports that Mr. Trump, while still in office early during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, secretly sent Mr. Putin what were then rare Abbott Point of Care test machines for the Russian’s personal use. Mr. Putin, who has been described as particularly anxious about being infected at the time, urged Mr. Trump to not publicly reveal the gesture because it could damage the American president politically. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Mr. Putin reportedly told him.
The Trump campaign has, of course, attacked Woodward, calling him “a total sleazebag” who is “slow, lethargic, incompetent, and overall a boring person with no personality,” and claiming, “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
During an interview that aired on 60 Minutes last night, Kamala Harris warned voters, “Donald Trump, if he were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now. He talks about, ‘Oh, he can end it on day one.’ You know what that is? It’s about surrender.”
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