Donald Trump gave an interview Thursday with RT, Russia’s state-sponsored worldwide news network, in which he said it was “probably unlikely” that the Kremlin was interfering with the usa presidential election.
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Mr Putin “has very strong control over a country”, Mr Trump said.
“He’s been a leader far more than our president has been a leader”, Mr Trump said of the Russian president.
Mrs Clinton offered herself as a model of “absolute rock steadiness” on foreign policy, and Mr Trump promised to be a disruptive force for improvement, saying that under Mr Obama even the military’s generals have been “reduced to rubble”. I mean they’ll take a statement that you make which is flawless and they’ll cut it up and chop it up and shorten it or lengthen it or do something with it.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Wednesday at a press conference that: “Vladimir Putin is an aggressor that does not share interests”.
Clinton’s presidential campaign took issue with the interview, which came hours after Trump praised Putin’s leadership during a NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum.
A flood of Republican national security experts have instead chosen to back Clinton, helping bolster her case that Trump is broadly unacceptable.
The interview was striking given that Trump spent Thursday on the defensive over some of his laudatory comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, told CBS that Trump did the interview as a “favor for Larry King”. “What Larry King does with the interview content is up to him, we have nothing to do with it”, said Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign aide.
The Trump campaign recently lifted a ban on various news outlets, including The Washington Post, which he accused of bias in its coverage. His most recent remarks, at a forum on national security Wednesday and then again in an interview broadcast Thursday by RT, have left some fellow Republicans trying to navigate potential political land mines.
“The media has been unbelievably dishonest”, Trump told King. “Nobody said it was going to be on Russian TV”, she told CNN’s “New Day”.
“With the Clintons, it’s all about the money”, Upshur said. “And I saw, just two or three days ago, they looked like they were not exactly getting along, but I looked at President Obama and Putin staring at each other. I’ll just leave it at that”, he said. Page, adviser to Russia’s state gas company, has been known to be very pro-Russia and in fact, gave a speech very critical of U.S. policy in Moscow.
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Trump’s praise of Putin and his suggestion that the United States and Russian Federation form an alliance to defeat Islamic State militants could raise eyebrows among foreign policy experts who feel Moscow is interfering with efforts to stem the Syrian civil war.
