Trump secretly maintains a friendship with Putin and called him this year, according to the Washington Post.
Former President and candidate for the upcoming elections in the U.S., Donald Trump, has been secretly friends with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Their relationship began to develop in 2020, during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, their connection has persisted, and they even spoke on the phone this year.
This was revealed in the book "War" by Bob Woodward, the deputy editor of The Washington Post. According to him, it was Putin who initiated the secrecy surrounding this friendship.
Woodward stated that in 2020, when the U.S. faced a shortage of COVID tests, then-President Donald Trump sent several tests to Vladimir Putin for personal use. The Russian leader was “petrified by the virus,” so he accepted the deliveries but warned Trump not to disclose their connection.
“I want you to tell no one, because people will curse you, not me,” Putin allegedly told Trump.
The book, which will be released on October 15, also mentions that the good relationship between the politicians likely persisted even as Trump campaigned for a return to the White House while Putin led a bloody war in Ukraine. In early 2024, Trump instructed his aide to leave his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could have a private phone conversation with Putin.
At the same time, Woodward does not specify what the president might have discussed. Trump campaign representative Steven Cheng claimed that these stories are supposedly fabricated. However, an unnamed Republican aide mentioned in the book states that the American leader communicated with Putin at least seven times after leaving the White House in 2021.
Furthermore, the WP concluded that “Trump is worse than Richard Nixon,” who resigned from the presidency due to the Watergate scandal. Interestingly, this was revealed by Woodward’s colleague at The Washington Post, Carl Bernstein.
“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history, and he exhibits the same character as the 2024 presidential candidate,” the book states.
Putin and Trump
Another American publication, The New York Times, released an article stating that Vladimir Putin systematically and methodically influenced Donald Trump. This comprehensive influence began to seriously engage in 2017. Meanwhile, he skillfully appealed to the norms of the Monroe Doctrine, which was adapted to the situation in Latin America by the 26th President Theodore Roosevelt.
The Russian leader thus justified the alleged "influence" of Russia in Ukraine, explaining it as a right to intervene in Kyiv's internal affairs, which in practice meant the occupation of Crimea and military actions in eastern Ukraine. Roosevelt emphasized that the U.S. had the right to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American countries if necessary to maintain stability and prevent European intervention.
It is worth noting that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have dared to invade Ukraine if Donald Trump had been the president of the U.S. in February 2022. According to him, the unpredictability of the American politician might have convinced the occupying leader not to take risks and not to start a war with Ukraine. Johnson also commented on Ukraine's fears regarding the possible return of Trump to the presidency.
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