Donald Trump hat seit seiner Wahlniederlage „bis zu sieben Gespräche“ mit Putin geführt

Is anyone actually surprised by this? Trump is going to continue being Trump and there’s nothing we can fucking do about it.

Donald Trump is understood to have held “maybe as many as seven” phone calls with President Putin since leaving the White House in 2021.

In his new book War, the veteran journalist Bob Woodward details the former president’s close relationship with the Russian leader as his forces continued their assault on Ukraine, a US ally.

Early this year, Trump ordered an aide away from his office so that he could hold a private phone call with the Russian leader, Woodward reported. The aide suggested that the two men may have spoken as many as seven times since the former president left the White House in 2021.

In 2020, with the pandemic sweeping the globe and the US facing a critical shortfall of tests to detect the disease, Trump is understood to have secretly sent a consignment of Covid-19 tests to Moscow for Putin’s personal use.

The Russian president, who was terrified of the virus, accepted the shipment but cautioned Trump not to reveal it to avoid a political backlash in the US as Trump was seeking re-election, Woodward reported.

“I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Putin advised Trump, according to the book.

Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein are best known for exposing the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974.

In War, which will be published on October 15, Woodward wrote that Trump’s covert communications with an authoritarian leader at war with a US ally represents a greater scandal than the Watergate affair.

“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward wrote.

Trump has bragged for years about his “very good relationship” with Putin during his presidency and openly voiced his admiration for the Russian leader as he campaigns for the White House for a third time.

The former president insists that Putin “would never have gone into Ukraine” if he were president and has vowed to end the war “in a day” if he triumphs in November’s presidential election.

Woodward’s book, his fourth since Trump’s surprise election victory in 2016, suggests that the close relationship between the two leaders has persisted as the former president plotted his comeback, launching his re-election campaign last year.

Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Trump’s rival for the White House, has denounced the Republican nominee’s relationship with Putin on the campaign trail. Harris has accused the former president of “cosying up to dictators” and claimed that America’s adversaries were “rooting for Trump” in a long-term project to undermine the foundations of democracy.

In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes on Monday evening, Harris said that if Trump were president, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now” and said that her rival’s plan to end the war amounted to forcing Ukraine to “surrender”.

In the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as Biden mobilised Nato and US allies around the world to unite against Moscow’s aggression, imposing sanctions on the Kremlin, Trump described the assault as “genius” and “savvy”.

The claims in Woodward’s book come weeks after the US Justice Department accused Russia of seeking to influence November’s election, announcing criminal charges against state media figures in Moscow. The FBI has seized dozens of internet domains it alleges were used to spread propaganda and disinformation from the Kremlin. Right-wing influencers in the US were allegedly recruited to undermine public support for continued American aid to Ukraine.

US intelligence agencies found that Moscow intervened to help Trump in the 2016 election, when he won against Hillary Clinton, and again in 2020, when he was defeated by Biden.

Trump defended Russia over the claims of meddling in the 2016 election. After he and Putin held closed-door talks for almost two hours at a summit in Helsinki in 2018, Trump was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian leader over the allegations of election interference.

“President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Trump replied.

It sickens me to see people who think they are everyday americans supporting a putincock choking traitor.

Well, that’s not fishy at all.

Who among us can claim we’ve been able to entirely avoid repeatedly talking to authoritarian dictators as private citizens?

I mean, just the other day I was at the grocery store and ran into both Viktor Orban in the bread aisle. Chatty guy.

As an American I just can’t believe that this is real. Other Americans are willing to ignore what is going on just so their side gets in? That is traitorous. These people are not here for you and you can read about it literally everywhere! They are power hungry assholes who are deceitful and care nothing for us. What are you doing!?!? Open your eyes. I literally feel ashamed to call myself american and I cannot believe that when the rest of the world speaks about us, those of us who are trying to stop this madness are mentioned in the same verse. Disgusting.

People who couldn’t be convinced Trump is a Russian asset need to start asking themselves why he would call a foreign adversary as many times as he has.

Biannual performance review.

Isn’t this illegal?

Fat Joffrey needs to check in with his boss for his quarterly performance review

I’ve had up to 7 calls with Putin too.

Puppet.

I worked for a lawyer in DC who had immediate family working in non-elected govt positions. He made it very clear that all international calls were recorded, and even the smallest red flag (who what when where) would guarantee the call was monitored either during the call, or checked asap afterwards.

I have no doubt that a few somebodys involved with national security know exactly what was said between them.

Every mention of a “Deep State” is a confession.

Isn’t that illegal under the Logan Act?