Trump is largely alone in his sustained praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin as “smart,” an assessment he reiterated last week during speeches to donors.
by sending anti-tank weapons and surface-to-air missiles to Ukraine and pledging to dramatically increase its defense budget.
“I think President Trump, at least at it related to Ukraine, was able to deter Vladimir Putin. And that was a function of unpredictability, which is valuable to deterring an autocrat like Vladimir Putin,” he said. Still, he argued Putin’s actions had been “so aggressive and so brazen and so immoral” that it had “de-emphasized the difference” between various foreign policy approaches.
Trump also pushed discredited claims that Ukraine, not Russia, had meddled in the 2016 election, repeatedly siding with Putin over his own national intelligence agencies. That’s left Trump relatively isolated, defending his decision to label Putin as “smart” and criticizing the response from Biden and other Western leaders, even as he has denounced the invasion as “horrific” and a “very sad thing for the world.”
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News there “should be no confusion about Vladimir Putin.