During a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday, Donald Trump took a break from his extended comments on Kamala Harris being a “low IQ individual” and her perceived agenda to stop people from saying “Merry Christmas” to heap praise, once again, on the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
Congratulating Putin for this week’s historic prisoner swap trumpeted by the Biden Administration, which brought home three Americans detained in Russia: Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva, Trump gave full credit to Putin for having made “yet another great deal,” receiving a response of almost total silence from the crowd, which he elsewhere commented on as not being as packed as he would have liked.
“We got our people back, but boy we make some horrible, horrible deals,” Trump said. “It’s nice to say we got ’em back, but does that set a bad precedent?” he added.
Earlier this week, the White House spoke to press about the details of the swap, clarifying that no money was exchanged and no sanctions were loosened to facilitate this deal, according to a reporter quoted by Reuters in their coverage of the presser.
“Trump congratulates Putin and not Biden. He is not loyal to the United States. This is not opinion. This is fact,” writes journalist and lawyer Daniel Miller in a post to X, just one of many expressions of a similar sentiment circulating in the wake of Trump’s comment.
Trump’s allegiance to Putin is not a new thing and has raised concerns over how it could impact America, should Trump get a second term.
“Trump views Putin as a strongman,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and a national security official in the first two years of Trump’s administration, in a quote from The Guardian. “In a way they’re working in parallel because they’re both trying to weaken the U.S., but for very different reasons.”