Trump Claims Putin Has Never Fooled Him — After Admitting Putin Keeps Fooling Him

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump declared Monday that Vladimir Putin has never fooled him, just moments after detailing how the Russian dictator has repeatedly fooled him by having pleasant conversations with him just before launching new attacks against Ukraine to murder innocent civilians.

“I speak to him a lot about getting this thing done and I always hang up and say, well, that was a nice phone call, and then missiles launched into Kyiv or some other city,” Trump said in an Oval Office photo opportunity with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

“I go home, I tell the first lady, you know, I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation. She said, ‘Oh, really? Another city was just hit.’ So it’s like, look, he’s ― I don’t want to say he’s an assassin, but he’s a tough guy.”

Trump immediately went on to claim that Putin had tricked every other president who has been in office — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden ― since he came to power. “He’s fooled a lot of people. He fooled Bush. He fooled a lot of people. He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn’t fool me,” Trump said.

The purpose of Trump’s Monday mini-press conference was to announce that he would impose “secondary tariffs” against Russia if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire deal within 50 days and that he had approved the sale of new U.S. military equipment to Ukraine, to be paid for by NATO’s European members, including key Patriot anti-missile systems.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later clarified that Trump meant “secondary sanctions” — that is, penalties against individuals and countries helping finance Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by trading with it.

Trump said several times he would impose secondary “tariffs” against countries of 100% if they continued trading with Russia, and that a bipartisan sanctions bill in Congress would allow him to impose tariffs of up to 500%.

In fact, the authority to impose those tariffs make up just one section of the bill, co-sponsored by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal. The rest of it allows Trump’s Treasury Department to impose further banking sanctions against top Russian officials as well as individuals from other countries who interact with them.

Monday’s statements show Trump’s continuing evolution on the topic of Ukraine. In 2019, he famously tried to extort its new president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, into announcing an investigation into then-presidential candidate Biden, by withholding congressionally approved military assistance. Trump was ultimately impeached for that action but remained in office because all but one Republican senator chose not to convict him.

Then, after Putin began his invasion in February 2022 to seize the entire country, Trump initially called him “savvy” and a “genius” for having started the bloodshed, which even then was targeting residential areas in cities far from the front lines.

Trump then began blaming Biden, who defeated him in 2020 and was president at the time, for Putin’s invasion, and later began blaming Zelenskyy for having been invaded. Only in recent months has Trump begun attributing any of the blame to Putin.

“It was Biden’s war,” Trump repeated Monday and again lied that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. “The election was rigged.”

At one point, Trump started to edge back toward praising Putin for aggressively seizing more Ukrainian land recently. “Russia has really taken a very positive, very, very strong ― I mean, what they’ve done the last couple of weeks,” he said.

Rutte, who largely was using the common strategy adopted by foreign officials of continually praising Trump, interjected that Putin was, in fact, murdering Ukrainians in their homes. “This is not because of military goals. It is just creating panic, getting people out of their sleep, hitting towns. It’s really terrible and it is meaning a lot of people lose their lives,” Rutte said.