This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 12 episode of “Velshi.”
Over the last few months, as part of an ongoing series on “Velshi,” we’ve taken viewers “Inside Project 2025,” the 922-page right-wing playbook for a second Trump presidency. However, now that we know what’s potentially in store, it’s important to look back at the previous Trump administration and remind ourselves what he has already done, how he governed, and how he’d likely do it all again.
Because, as the great Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Let’s consider Donald Trump’s interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last week, we were reminded of their unconventional relationship after reporting in veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” revealed that Trump and Putin have spoken several times since Trump left office and since Russia invaded Ukraine. (Neither NBC News nor MSNBC has independently verified Woodward’s report.)
As the great Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
While Trump and the Kremlin deny that reporting, the former president and his buddies in Russia aren’t in lockstep on another other revelation. According to Woodward, in 2020, Trump secretly sent Covid-19 testing equipment to Putin for his personal use — at a time when testing was hard to come by in America. Trump has denied these claims. The Kremlin has confirmed them.
Trump’s overarching relationship with the Russian dictator — his envy of Putin’s power, his adulation for Putin’s repression, his dismissal of Putin’s crimes — is undeniable. And it was evident from the first knockings of Trump’s presidency.
Trump and Putin first met face to face in Germany in July 2017 during a G20 summit. For two hours, Trump and Putin, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and a pair of interpreters, held a closed-door meeting in Hamburg.
After the meeting, as first reported by The Washington Post, Trump took the interpreters’ notes and instructed them not to brief anyone on the meeting. This would become an unofficial policy. In 2019, the Post reported that there were no detailed records, nor classified ones, of Trump and Putin’s first five in-person meetings.
About a year after Hamburg, there was a summit in Helsinki. Trump and Putin emerged from yet another meeting in which Trump would not allow notes. And later at a news conference, Trump, standing next to Putin, defied his own intelligence officials by taking Putin’s word that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election.
When Putin “won” re-election in 2018, Trump was reportedly sent into a White House news briefing with sage advice: Do not congratulate Putin on winning an election that was neither free nor fair. But he congratulated the Russian president anyway.
“I had a call with President Putin to congratulate him on the victory, his electoral victory,” Trump told reporters at the time.
This kind of deference isn’t just unbecoming of a president, it’s also political leverage for an adversary. According to Woodward’s new book, Putin knew that receiving Covid tests from Trump was a political liability — not for him, but for Trump: “Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump. “I don’t care,” Trump replied. “Fine.” “No, no,” Putin said. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Putin himself had the sense of something Trump didn’t: that an American president should not be secretly communicating with a global adversary or sending him scarce Covid tests. Let’s go back to that first meeting in Germany in 2017. According to The New York Times, Tillerson briefed his aides shortly after the meeting saying, “We’ve got work to do to change the president’s mind on Ukraine.” That’s because, as the Times reports, Tillerson watched Putin spin a tall tale about Ukraine — all the propaganda he would later use to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and he watched Trump buy every word. According to that report, Trump entered that meeting armed with talking points from his aides to challenge Putin, only for the president to not use any of them. Trump even asked Putin what he thought about the U.S. sending weapons to Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, Putin said it would be a mistake and Trump seemed to listen. In 2019, Trump had what he called a “perfect phone call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he pressured the Ukrainian leader for dirt on his political rival, Joe Biden. Linked to this request was millions in military aid which Trump temporarily withheld from Ukraine. Trump was later impeached over that phone call. (He was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.) Trump’s apathy for Ukraine, his preference to believe Putin over U.S. officials, the secret calls and the broad admiration for an autocrat — it all makes you wonder how things might play out in a second Trump term. As Angelou wisely warned, “Believe them the first time.”
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
Armand Manoukian
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