Considering the audience the network reaches, it seems highly unlikely that an interview between prominent host Larry King and Donald Trump would accidentally appear on RT America.
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“If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him”, Trump said at the Wednesday event, even calling the Russian president “a leader, far more than our president has been a leader”.
“What Larry King does with the interview content is up to him”.
Trump criticized USA policy in Iraq from the days of Republican President George W. Bush, who ordered the American-led invasion in 2003 in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the United States. “I think maybe the Democrats are putting that out”, he said.
“Hillary Clinton with her policies and Barack Obama – you know, look, we should have never gone into Iraq”. Period”, Trump said. “But once we went in, Larry, we shouldn’t have gotten out the way we got out.
Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, echoed those sentiments, saying that Putin was a “stronger leader” than Obama. The Republican candidate again cast doubt on whether Russian Federation was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, a belief at odds with US intelligence officials.
Critics of the network, which mostly targets audiences outside of Russian Federation and also includes programming in Spanish, Hindi and Arabic, have described it as a propaganda arm of Putin’s government.
Mike Pence, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, has backed up Trump on his view of Putin. The station is funded entirely by the Russian government.
In his interview with King, Trump said that he does not believe Vladimir Putin is behind the release of these emails.
Regardless of the knowledge that Trump had entering the interview, his appearance on Russian television will prove significant in the 2016 presidential election.
“When he calls me brilliant, I’ll take the compliment”, he said at MSNBC/NBC’s Commander-in-Chief forum.
“Putin said some very good things about me”, Trump said at a rally in OH on August 1.
Trump and Putin: The new bromantics? In an interview with The Washington Post last month, he said that he saw no distinction between RT and news outlets like CNN or MSNBC.
Clinton’s campaign has seized on criticism of Trump for lauding Putin, frequently pointing to the Republican’s praise of the Russian president as disqualifying for the White House.
During the 2012 race, GOP nominee Mitt Romney – a virulent Trump critic – warned about Russia’s growing influence and called the country the U.S.’s biggest geopolitical threat, something then mocked by Obama and Democrats as hearkening back to the Cold War and the 1950s.
Putin doesn’t have a good image in the United States, either.
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On Trump’s part, he has expressed admiration for Putin’s 82% approval rating as an example of having “very strong control over a country”.
