This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 11 episode of “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
It’s only been one week since the election and President-elect Donald Trump is already in contact with his old buddy Vladimir Putin. Or is he?
A new report in The Washington Post, citing “several people familiar with the matter,” says the two spoke last Thursday. According to the Post, during the call, Trump “advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” (Neither NBC News nor MSNBC has independently confirmed the report.)
In a normal world, if things came down to a “he said, he said” with the Kremlin, we would know whom to believe, the president-elect, but we don’t live in a normal world.
Now, that’s not at all in line with what Trump has long said publicly about his position on Russia’s war with Ukraine — a position that most experts expect would include cutting off aid to Ukraine and basically standing by while Russia holds onto its territory. It’s also not in line with Trump’s threat he could pull the U.S. out of NATO.
But here’s where the situation gets tricky: The Kremlin says that call never happened. Now, in a normal world, if things came down to a “he said, he said” with the Kremlin, we would know whom to believe, the president-elect of the United States, but we don’t live in a normal world.
And we know from Trump’s first term that the man has a history of being, shall we say, less than forthcoming about his conversations with Putin. A Washington Post analysis from 2019 found at least 16 private conversations between the men from Trump’s first three years in office — and those are just the ones we know about.
The relationship between the two leaders is still shrouded in mystery. There was, of course, that infamous two-hour closed-door meeting between them in Helsinki back in 2018. Despite efforts from lawmakers and reporters, we still know remarkably little about that conversation.
That’s because Trump doesn’t want us to know. In fact, you may remember that Trump even tried to obscure his conversations with Putin from his own administration. Again, according to reporting from the Post:
Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other officials.
Let me tell you, that’s not normal behavior from a president of the United States.
That particular controversy was after a meeting between the two men at a G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017 and it was not an isolated incident. Something similar happened after another G20 meeting in Buenos Aires the following year. As the Financial Times reported back then, “Trump sat down with Putin for several minutes of conversation … with no translator or note-taker from the U.S. side to record the dialogue between the leaders.” And ahead of the 2019 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump told reporters that his conversations with Putin were “none of your business.” So yes, there is a pattern here.
You don’t need to believe in shadowy conspiracies about the Russian “kompromat” to understand that Trump is consistently obscuring the nature and extent of his relationship with Putin. This phone call that may or may not have happened is just the latest example.
Trump has not even been sworn into his second term yet and there are already questions swirling about whether and why he is, once again, misleading the American public about his relationship with Russia and Putin.
