During his interview this week with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Donald Trump said he’d like to see the war in Ukraine — a difficult subject for the president — end “immediately.” After the Republican added that he’d spoken to Russia’s Vladimir Putin about Ukraine during his first term, the host asked a rather obvious follow-up question: “Have you spoken to him?”
The president replied, “I don’t want to say.”
Hannity: How quickly can this war in Europe end?
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 24, 2025
Trump: It should end immediately
Hannity: Have you spoken to Putin?
Trump: I don't want to say pic.twitter.com/Ubdq20wh5G
Hannity didn’t press the point, but it’s not at all clear why, exactly, Trump didn’t want to answer the question — or more to the point, why he still won’t answer the question.
“Have you spoken to Vladimir Putin since your election?” Time magazine asked Trump in a post-election interview. All he had to do was say yes or no. The Republican did neither.
“I can’t tell you,” Trump replied. “I can’t tell you. It’s just inappropriate.”
There is, of course, nothing “inappropriate” about the president disclosing conversations with foreign leaders. Last week, for example, just a few days before his second inaugural, Trump published an item to his social media platform that read in part, “I just spoke to Chairman Xi Jinping of China. The call was a very good one for both China and the U.S.A.”
He has made plenty of similar comments recently. As we recently discussed, since winning a second term, Trump touted his interactions with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, among others.
Indeed, Trump didn’t express the slightest reservations about promoting these discussions. By all appearances, he was proud of them, using the chats as proof of his importance.
And yet, while Trump has been eager to let the public know about these chats with foreign leaders, Trump apparently believes he has to remain silent when it comes to Putin.
If his refusal to talk about this sounds at all familiar, it’s because he’s adopted this posture before. In fact, as regular readers might recall, it was in early May 2016, as political observers just started to consider questions about Trump and his relationship with the Russian leader, when the then-candidate was asked whether he’d spoken to Putin. “I don’t want to say,” the Republican replied.
A day later, Trump sat down with Fox News’ Bret Baier, who followed up on the question. “Yeah, I have no comment on that,” the future president replied. “No comment.” The Fox host, apparently surprised, said one of the things people liked about Trump was his willingness “to answer any question.” The candidate didn’t seem to care. “Yeah, but I don’t want to comment,” he added. It was an early indication that Trump’s relationship with his benefactor in Moscow was, to understate matters, problematic. After all, the Republican hardly ever said “No comment” in response to any question on any subject. He loved, and continues to love, commenting — even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. But asked about whether he’d had direct interactions with Putin, the then-candidate suddenly had nothing to say. Matters did not improve in the years that followed. In fact, The Washington Post reported in 2019 that Trump and the Russian leader had a series of undisclosed chats during the Republican’s first term in the White House. (The reporting was not independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.) More recently, Bob Woodward’s latest book, citing a senior Trump aide, alleged that Trump and Putin had direct conversations “as many as seven times” after he left office following his 2020 defeat. (The account is credited to a single anonymous aide and provides no further details. Neither NBC News nor MSNBC independently confirmed the reporting.) The Kremlin denied the accuracy of the claim, as did Trump initially, though in October — just a few weeks before Election Day 2024 — the Republican boasted that it’d be “a smart thing” if he had secret communications with the Russian autocrat. Now, as his second term begins, Trump is once again reluctant to say whether he has spoken to Putin or not. For those concerned about the president’s relationship with his friend in Moscow, this isn’t going to help. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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