President Donald Trump has admitted falling for Vladimir Putin’s BS, as he squirmed under a grilling from a reporter.
Libbey Dean, a White House correspondent for NewsNation, challenged the president, 79, on board Air Force One as he returned to Washington, D.C., after a two-week stay at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Dean’s Sunday evening grilling comes after Trump publicly defended the Russian president over his claim that Ukraine had launched long-range drones at one of his palatial homes—an attack which Trump now concedes didn’t happen.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was forced to deny his forces were behind the alleged strike on Putin’s luxurious dacha on Lake Valdai, in the northwestern Novgorod region, after the Kremlin leader phoned up POTUS to complain about it.
However, he had a change of tone on board AF1. “I don’t believe that strike happened,” he told reporters. “There is something that happened fairly nearby, but it had nothing to do with this.”
Trump, last Monday, had come out and said he was “very angry” with Ukraine for conducting the strike, following his call with Putin. Dean asked why she believed his on-again, off-again ally.
“Because nobody knew at that moment, I mean that was the first I heard about it,” he declared, suggesting that he immediately took the Russian president’s claims at face value. “He said that his house was attacked. We don’t believe that happened, now that we’ve been able to check. That was the first we ever heard about it.”
The ‘strike,’ which Putin said his defense systems were able to repel, came as peace talks had appeared to progress. European officials blasted the Kremlin chief for trying to undermine the effort.
By the middle of last week, Trump appeared to realize he was duped by Putin. On Truth Social, he reposted a New York Post editorial which called the claims into question and blasted Putin for choosing “lies, hatred, and death” at a crucial juncture in talks.
Putin is dragging his heels over an agreement, wanting a laundry list of demands solidified before he agrees to anything. Ukraine sees the demands, such as vast territorial concessions, as unreasonable. Despite the impasse, Trump has said that an end to the war is “closer than ever before.”
On Air Force One on Sunday, he was once again asked to put a timeframe on a deal. “I don’t do deadlines,” he replied, despite having repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail in 2024 that he could end the conflict on day one of his presidency.
In response to the deadline question, he rambled about Cambodia and Thailand, whose conflict he says he helped end. “I give myself one quarter of a point for that, so now I’m eight and one quarter points,” he declared, referring to the number of wars he claims to have ended.
“I think we’ll have a deal at some point, hopefully in the not too distant [future],” he eventually agreed.
