In the United States, less than a month before the presidential election, recent revelations about a certain closeness between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are raising questions. In the midst of the electoral campaign and while Russia is suspected of interfering in elections outside its territory, certain details on the relations between the two men raise questions.
Since leaving office at the start of 2021, former US President Donald Trump has spoken up to seven times with Russian President Vladimir Putin… this is what emerges from research by the American investigative journalist Bob Woodward.
While he was in office, Donald Trump also reportedly personally sent Covid-19 tests to the Russian president at the start of the pandemic at a time when these tests were also very rare in the United States.
Vladimir Putin would have, at the time, advised him to keep it secret, because this action could harm him, Donald Trump, on a political level.
Bob Woodward, the investigative journalist
Bob Woodward rose to fame in the early 1970s when he exposed the Watergate scandal in the Washington Post and has since been considered one of America’s most renowned investigative journalists. Its findings were also released on Tuesday. They are taken from his new book War, which is due out next week.
It’s not just about Trump’s relationship with Russia. It also discusses the influence of American presidents on geopolitics, notably on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. According to the Post, Woodward presents a lot of inside information – including on Joe Biden.
But none of this is currently generating as many clicks on the Internet as the alleged revelation about Donald Trump. Probably also because she provided the Washington Post with the headline for the advance review of the book.
Donald Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung denied the claims, calling them “fiction.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov also denied to various media the existence of these alleged phone calls between Putin and Trump. On the other hand, he confirmed to the Washington Post the delivery of Covid testing equipment while recalling that Russia had also provided medical equipment and protective clothing to the United States in 2020.
Regardless, the Democratic Party was quick to seize the opportunity to use these revelations against Donald Trump, Republican candidate for the White House.
Now the question arises of the final impact of these revelations on the electoral campaign. Lawrence O’Donnell, American political commentator, however, remains doubtful. According to him, “this kind of subject would have ended any presidential campaign before the Trump era… would have destroyed the candidate. But Donald Trump transformed the Republican Party into the Trump Party and seems to have locked in 47% of the votes”in the United States.
Trump’s questionable proximity to Putin
Donald Trump regularly claims that he has a particularly good relationship with Vladimir Putin. At the end of September again, he stressed this during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York: this could help to quickly end the war in Ukraine if he was re-elected President of the United States in November.
His opponents, on the other hand, criticize Trump for being too close to the head of the Kremlin and even sometimes acting in the interests of Moscow. One fear is that an agreement to end the war in Ukraine could mean big concessions to Moscow under a Trump presidency.
For some analysts, Donald Trump’s attitude towards Russia is puzzling, because false Russian information is believed to have largely contributed to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US election campaign. Robert Mueller, the special advisor in charge The case found that Trump’s campaign tried to cover up his contacts with Russian agents and that he personally tried to obstruct the investigation.
The ex-president’s former national security adviser, Herbert Raymond McMaster, wrote about his time in the White House that it was hardly possible to criticize Trump’s Russia policy. According to him “ Putin, an unscrupulous former KGB man, played to Trump’s ego by flattering him.
McMaster points out, however, that Donald Trump was not the first American president to underestimate Vladimir Putin. George Bush Jr. and Barack Obama have also always refused to get tougher with the Kremlin.
Another source of concern is Donald Trump’s vision of NATO. The former president called the North Atlantic military alliance obsolete.
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