Mr Trump was interviewed on Thursday night by Larry King, a former CNN host who now presents a show on RT America, a Russian-funded TV network. “Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russian Federation, slammed Trump for the appearance, tweeting: “[Ronald] Reagan never gave interviews to Pravda while campaigning to be our president.
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In a Thursday interview with King, Trump said the Russian government “probably” did not meddle in the American presidential race, and that the Hillary Clinton camp’s suggestion otherwise was politically motivated.
“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”. “I’d be having dinner with you someplace maybe”, the billionaire businessman told King with a slight laugh. “The man has very strong control over a country”, Trump said.
Trump recently lifted a ban on several news organizations he believed treated him unfairly, including the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and Politico. Trump primary voters give Putin a net favorability of -23, while GOP primary voters who say they supported another candidate give Putin a much worse net favorability rating of -61.
He also suggested that the allegation was politically motivated.
“Trump was never told it would be shared anywhere else”, and that Trump would not have agreed to do the interview had he known it would air on RT America – an operation of government-funded news outlet Russia Today.
Trump’s continued unvarnished praise instead of unequivocal condemnation for Putin is yet another example of where the party’s standard-bearer has broken with GOP orthodoxy.
WASHINGTON-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized USA policy in Iraq again, but this time he aired his grievances on an unusual platform: a Russian government-funded television network.
On Thursday, Trump’s campaign leaders and surrogates did the TV rounds and defended Trump’s praise of Putin.
“What would Ronald Reagan say about a Republican nominee who attacks American generals and heaps praise on Russia’s president?” she asked.
But as an IN congressman, Pence took a much more critical view of Russian Federation under Putin’s leadership, signing a letter to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice IN 2006 expressing alarm about “mafia-style assassinations” being conducted against journalists IN Putin’s Russian Federation.
Putin’s rule has not boded well for many parts of the world.
The number who view Putin favorably rose from 10 percent to 24 percent.
As secretary of state, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton tried to improve relations with the country, touting a “reset” – complete with a reset button for a photo-op – in 2009 with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
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In 2014, Clinton said on NPR’s On Point that the reset “worked” and “succeeded”, because it was “a device to try to refocus attention on the transactional efforts that we needed to get done with the Russians”.
