Fox News’ Brit Hume took issue with President Donald Trump’s assertion that “something has happened” to Vladimir Putin, causing the Russian president to go “absolutely CRAZY.”
Speaking on the conservative news network on Monday, the long-time White House correspondent and former anchor said that the Russian leader is the same man he's always been.
"I don’t think Putin’s changed. I don’t know what the President’s talking about," Hume said. "This is the way Putin has always been. He’s always been a particularly brutal dictator, willing to take whatever measures he thought necessary to advance his interests. Whatever he thought he could get away with."
Hume accused Trump of having an “odd conception” of his Russian counterpart, saying that he didn't have an appropriately adversarial relationship with the ex-KGB man.
“He thought that he and Putin could be kind of friends and partners and make deals together,” Hume said.
On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict within a day of his inauguration. Since taking office, he has blamed former President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the war’s outbreak while continuing his praise of Putin. His rant to Truth Social on Sunday found Trump taking a different tack. The president said that Putin "is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers."
Hume said he hoped that Trump’s Sunday comments might signal a shift in Trump’s approach to the war.
On Tuesday, Trump doubled down on his criticisms, saying Putin “doesn’t realize” that without him in the White House, “lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia.”
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