Donald Trump has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin keeps using the “n-word”, as in “nuclear”, and he has claimed that Mr Putin is a “different” man than the one he interacted with during his time in the White House.
“I listen to him constantly using the n-word, that’s the n-word, and he’s constantly using it, the nuclear word,” Mr Trump told Fox Business Network on Monday.
“He says ‘we’re looking at their nuclear power,’ but we’re a greater nuclear power,” Mr Trump added.
Mr Trump said the US nuclear arsenal is “immensely powerful and hope to god, you’d never have to use it because it would be that would be the tragedy of all tragedies. But if we didn’t have it, we couldn’t talk”.
“We say ‘oh, he’s a nuclear power,’ but we’re a greater nuclear power. We have the greatest submarines, the world’s most powerful machines ever built,” Mr Trump said.
“You can’t let this tragedy continue,” Mr Trump said about the war in Ukraine. “You can’t let these thousands of people die. It’s going to be hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of people by the time it ends.”
The former president said Mr Putin is a “different person” compared to when he was in office.
“I got along with him, loving this country, and he loves his country, okay. But he’s a different person than he was, he seems to be different,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem to be the same person I was dealing with.”
“We did well with Russia,” Mr Trump said. “They didn’t attack any other countries under us. I’m the only one where that didn’t happen. And with Bush, they took Georgia, and they took Crimea with Biden and Obama. And now he said ‘to hell with it. Let’s take the whole thing’.”
“I listen to him constantly using the N-word, that’s the N-word, and he’s constantly using it, the nuclear word.”
— Trump giving his take on Putin and nuclear weapons pic.twitter.com/4VR4ZUkcT7
— The Recount (@therecount) March 21, 2022
“But even ‘sleepy eyes’ Chuck Todd on NBC said the other day when he was interviewing, I think it was [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken. He said, ‘how come this never happened under Trump?’ China didn’t do anything. Russia didn’t do it. Nobody did anything in fact, and we got along with North Korea,” Mr Trump claimed.
Jessica Pisano, an associate professor of politics at the New School for Social Research, wrote in an op-ed for Politico that a likely explanation as to why Mr Putin didn’t invade Ukraine during Mr Trump’s presidency was that “with Trump in office, Putin was already getting what he wanted. The election changed all that”.
“Consider where Trump and Biden stand on three key issue areas the Kremlin cares deeply about: NATO, political leadership in Ukraine and undermining democracy,” she added. “Under Trump, there was little daylight between Russia and the United States on these issues.”
“The truth is that during his administration, Trump’s policy alignment with Putin advanced the aims of Russia’s political elites, who could imagine that the United States was on their side,” she wrote.
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