Trump and Putin are even better friends than previously thought, Woodward’s new book reveals

There’s no secret Donald Trump To be a huge number fan belong to dictatorsand especially a dictator with his own heart. Of course, we talk about Vladimir Putin (in spite of Kim Jong Un To be sure receive flowers and candy on Valentine’s Day). As president of the United States, Trump on Putin’s side to his own intelligence officials. He had loads of good things to say about the Russian dictator, and called him a jerk “genius” and “knowledge” for invading Ukraine. He does protect Putin on (credible) allegations that the Russian President murdered journalists and dissidents. He went public called Putin helped bring him down Joe Biden. If he wins another term, many fear he will cut off support to Ukraine, and Let Russia take over. And according to a new report, he kept very, very been in close contact with his favorite autocrat in recent years.

New York Times reports that in a new book-War, coming out next week—veteran journalist Bob Woodward disclose that Trump “has secretly spoken to President Vladimir V. Putin… seven times since leaving office, even as he was pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine to fight the invade Russia.” In one scene, Woodward writes that in early 2024, the former president ordered an aide to leave his office at Mar-a-Lago so he could speak to Putin by phone. That aide, according to Woodward, estimated that Trump and Putin may have spoken a half-dozen other times since Trump left the White House in 2021.

Like time noted, “former presidents occasionally meet with foreign counterparts after leaving office,” and Trump has hosted the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban at Mar-a-Lago. But those meetings were not secret, and “it would be highly unusual for a former president to speak privately with a leading American adversary like Mr. Putin without clearly informing the current administration — especially was at a time when the United States and Russia were having close relations with each other. on opposite sides of a war in Europe.” On the other hand, Trump did many “very unusual” things, such as trying to win a second term after losing the election.

And speaking of anomalies:

The book also reported that Mr. Trump, while in office early in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, secretly sent Mr. Putin then-rare Abbott Point of Care testing machines for use by the Russians. Mr. Putin, who was described as being particularly worried about being infected at the time, urged Mr. Trump not to make the gesture public because it could damage the US president politically. “I don’t want you to tell anyone because everyone will be angry with you, not me,” Putin allegedly told him.

Of course, the Trump campaign attacked Woodward, calling him “a total sleazeball” who was “slow, apathetic, incompetent and generally a boring, personalityless person.” character” and declared, “None of Bob Woodward’s fabricated stories are true and are the work of a truly insane and deranged man who suffered from the debilitating Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

In the interview broadcast on 60 minutes last night, Kamala Harris warned voters, “Donald Trump, if he were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now. He said, ‘Oh, he could have finished it on the first day.’ Do you know what that is? It’s about surrender.”