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By Sonam Sheth
Evening Politics Editor
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Former President Donald Trump refused to directly confirm whether he has spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin since leaving office, while insisting that "if I did, it's a smart thing."
Trump made the comment while sparring with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait during a scheduled appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday.
"Can you say, yes or no, whether you have talked to Vladimir Putin since you stopped being president?" Micklethwait asked the Republican presidential nominee.
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"Well, I don't comment on that," Trump said. "But I will tell you that if I did, it's a smart thing. If I'm friendly with people, if I have a relationship with people, that's a good thing, not a bad thing, in terms of a country."
He added that Putin has "2,000 nuclear weapons, and so do we. China has a lot less, but they'll catch us within five years."
Micklethwait told Trump that his comments sounded "very much like you did talk to him." But Trump deflected again, saying, "I don't talk about — no, I don't talk about that."
Micklethwait pushed back, noting that Trump has boasted about talking to other world leaders, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "You talk about talking to these people," he said.
Trump cut him off.
"I can tell you what. Russia has never had a president that they respect so much," Trump said. He went on to tout his opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, in an apparent effort to show that he was tough on Russia.
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Trump repeatedly praised Putin as "tough" and "smart" while he was president, and called him a "genius" and "pretty savvy" after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022. His admiration of the Russian leader has stunned intelligence officials and sparked fears among some that a second Trump term could further destabilize US national security.
"Trump views Putin as a strongman," Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution who once worked in Trump's National Security Council, told The Guardian this year. "In a way they're working in parallel because they're both trying to weaken the US, but for very different reasons."
The veteran reporter Bob Woodward also wrote in a new book that Trump and Putin have had up to seven phone calls since 2021, according to excerpts published by CNN and The Washington Post last week.
The Trump campaign and the Kremlin both denied the report, though Russia later confirmed Woodward's reporting that Trump had sent Putin hard-to-come-by Covid tests in the early days of the pandemic.
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