Donald Trump is a man who famously likes the world to know how important he is and that means making it very clear to all and sundry that, if he picks up the phone to absolutely anyone – be they a president or a plutocrat – he or she will take the call.
But according to sensational claims in a new book by Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, there’s one world leader whose calls with the former US president are so sensitive that he ushers even his closest aides out of the room before taking them.
That leader is Vladimir Putin, who – a Trump aide told Woodward – has spoken on the phone with the Republican presidential contender ‘maybe as many as seven times’ since leaving office in 2021.
In fact, the relationship between the two is so close that, while president in 2020, Trump even sent the Russian dictator some sophisticated but scarce Covid-19 testing equipment for his own use during the pandemic.
Putin, a notorious hypochondriac who was terrified of the virus, urged Trump to keep news of the shipment under wraps for his own sake.
Vladimir Putin has spoken on the phone with the Donald Trump ‘maybe as many as seven times’ since leaving office in 2021
‘Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,’ Woodward claims Putin told the former president, to which Trump reportedly replied, ‘I don’t care. Fine.’
Putin then adds: ‘No, no. I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.’
The revelations in Woodward’s forthcoming book, War, have been denied by the Trump campaign. However, the Kremlin later confirmed the Abbott Point Of Care Covid test machines story was true but insisted the pair hadn’t spoken since Trump left office.
Shipping sought-after Covid machines to the Kremlin when they were desperately needed across the US is certainly deplorable. But the issue of greater concern to many in the US is the allegation that Trump has been in touch with the leader of a hostile foreign power which is at war with a US ally, Ukraine.
The White House said it had ‘serious concerns’ about such phone calls, although a spokesman said she couldn’t confirm they’d actually taken place. ‘If it is true, it is indeed concerning, because we’re talking about our national security here,’ she said.
Ex-CIA boss Leon Panetta said Trump was ‘naive’ about how Putin, a former KGB agent, is manipulating him and that his ‘engaging with an adversary… raises real questions about… his basic loyalty’.
Trump has made no secret of the fact that he admired Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. When Russian tanks rolled over the border in February, 2022, he used words like ‘genius’, ‘very smart’ and ‘savvy’ to describe Putin’s aggression, even as President Biden organised sanctions against the Kremlin.
Since then, Trump has made regular public pronouncements in support of Putin, while vilifying Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky and calling on Republican lawmakers to block billions of dollars of crucial military supplies to Kyiv.
Only a week ago, he claimed he had a ‘very good relationship’ with Putin and boasted that, if he returned to the White House, he could negotiate a peace deal in 24 hours, albeit on terms that are likely to be favourable to Russia.
Trump also pushed discredited claims that Ukraine, not Russia, had meddled in the US 2016 election, accepting Putin’s word rather than that of his own intelligence agencies.
Donald Trump likes to make it clear to all and sundry that, if he picks up the phone to call anyone – be they a president or a plutocrat – he or she will pick up, Tom Leonard writes
He has said, too, that he would ‘encourage’ Russia ‘to do whatever the hell they want’ to Nato allies that do not spend enough on defence.
The shocking new claims have revived the wider mystery of Trump’s strange relationship with Putin, one that flies in the face of decades of deep distrust of the Kremlin on the part of the Republican Party.
US intelligence agencies have accused Putin’s regime of interfering in presidential elections since 2016 in a bid to get Trump elected and suspicions over the friendship even spawned sensational claims in 2017 that the Kremlin had a trove of sex tapes involving Trump that were recorded during one of his visits to Russia.
The revelation was contained in an incendiary dossier on Trump compiled by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, which alleged Trump had taken part in ‘sex parties’ in St Petersburg and consorted with sex workers in Moscow.
This week, Steele – who remains a highly respected figure in the intelligence community – published a new book, Unredacted, in which he stood by those claims while making new allegations about Trump and his relationship with Putin.
He claims that Russian military intelligence plotted to kidnap Americans in Syria or Iraq with a view to allowing the Trump administration to recover them quickly in order to boost his popularity just before the 2020 election.
Steele, whose most salacious allegations about Trump have never been verified, calls Trump and the Republican Party ‘the gravest threat to Western democracy and the rule of law’ and ‘increasingly the willing handmaidens for Putin’.
He says the future integrity of Western democracy may well depend on intelligence agencies being able to investigate what influence Putin has over Trump.
Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent in next month’s presidential election, was quick to pounce on Woodward’s new claims. She told a US radio show: ‘I believe that Donald Trump has this desire to be a dictator. He admires strong men, and he gets played by them because he thinks that they’re his friends and they are manipulating him full-time, and manipulating him by flattery and with favour.’
According to Woodward, who teamed up with fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein to expose the 1972 Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, the pair are still talking even as Putin threatens to start a world war by using nuclear weapons.
He alleges that, in early 2024, Trump ordered an aide to leave his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Florida, so he could take a call from Putin in private.
Woodward, who says the information came from a Trump aide, doesn’t reveal what the two men discussed but it was the same insider who claimed Trump and Putin had talked on the phone up to seven times since the former left the White House.
It is certainly true that Trump has a soft spot for political hard men, prompting some critics to speculate that he would love to be an autocrat himself – and might behave in just such a manner if he were to win a second term.
Among those he’s praised as ‘strong’ and ‘tough’ are populist Argentine president Javier Milei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro – once dubbed the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ – Hungary’s Viktor Orban, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
However, Trump reserves a special admiration for Putin whom he has mentioned in 41 campaign rallies this year and who, even after the Ukraine invasion, he continues to call ‘smart’. (Trump has insisted that calling him smart is a statement of fact, not flattery.)
Sir William (Bill) Browder, the Anglo-American financier who is one of Putin’s most vociferous critics, tells the Mail that he isn’t surprised by the phone-call allegations which he believes must have been about Ukraine.
‘Trump has made himself very clear that he wants to get along with Putin,’ he says. ‘He admires and has very great affection for Putin, and he seems to be doing things that would make Putin happy.’
Russia benefits from Trump’s support over Ukraine, Trump benefits from Vladimir Putin ‘pushing the pedal to the metal’ to get him elected again, Tom Leonard writes
He cites Trump’s success in persuading congressional Republicans to drag their feet over approving some $50billion (£38billion) in military aid to Kyiv, a delay that some defence analysts believe stopped Ukraine forcing Moscow to the negotiating table long ago.
Sir William adds that, although Putin doesn’t reciprocate Trump’s personal affection for him as he’s a ‘psychopath’, the pair both gain considerably from their strategic alliance.
Russia benefits from Trump’s support over Ukraine, Trump benefits from Putin ‘pushing the pedal to the metal’ to get him elected again.
The Russian leader has form in this regard. US intelligence claims Putin authorised so-called ‘influence operations’ to help Trump in the 2020 election, while his 2016 campaign benefited from hacking by Russian intelligence officers.
The official report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Kremlin interference in the 2016 election confirmed various links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. Mueller has warned Russia will interfere in the election this year, too.
Sir William said there was already clear evidence of this, citing the announcement last month by the US Justice Department alleging Russia had been secretly funding a US media company that was paying six prominent conservative political commentators to churn out pro-Moscow online content designed to undermine American support for Ukraine.
Given that ‘there’s no reason any American should support Putin and betray Ukraine’, Trump could only be doing so because he was getting Russian help to win re-election, he said.
Sir William discounts the notion that Trump might be being blackmailed by the Kremlin, however, saying that the candidate who once boasted he could shoot someone dead on a busy Manhattan street and people would still vote for him is beyond shame.
However, the blackmail theory would certainly explain why Trump is so ready to go out on a limb for a country that the vast majority of Americans view negatively.
The Steele dossier caused huge ructions when it was leaked – allegedly without its author’s permission – by a US news outlet shortly before Trump took office in January 2017. Its main thrust was the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win.
By far the most sensational part of the research that Steele and his London-based intelligence firm, Orbis Business Research, had conducted on Trump for supporters of his election rival Hillary Clinton was the suggestion that the Kremlin had scandalous compromising material on him, known in Russia as ‘kompromat’.
According to Steele’s sources, Trump had been filmed on secret Russian intelligence cameras in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 2013, which he booked because he knew President and Mrs Obama had stayed there on an official trip.
He then allegedly ‘defiled’ the bed where they had slept by hiring prostitutes to perform a depraved act as he watched.
Two ‘knowledgeable St Petersburg sources’ apparently claimed Trump attended ‘sex parties’ in the city, but all direct witnesses to these sordid affairs are said to have subsequently been ‘silenced’: bribed or coerced into disappearing.
The dossier also claimed the Kremlin — sometimes through its diplomatic staff in the U.S. — has been ‘feeding’ Trump and his team ‘valuable intelligence on his opponents’ in an information exchange over at least eight years.
Trump dismissed it at the time as ‘fake news’ and ‘total fabrication’, adding that he was hardly likely to have taken part in sex parties or the less-than-sanitary behaviour in the Moscow hotel since he is a well-known germaphobe.
No proof has ever emerged to support the jaw-dropping claims but Steele continues to argue that the ‘original intelligence was obtained from credible sources’ and that the allegations have never been disproved in court.
‘We know it happens. Anyone who knows Russia and Russian counterintelligence knows about honey traps and about the filming of things in hotel rooms and hookers, and all the rest of it is just part of the scene in Russia,’ he told the Washington Post this week. ‘And so the actual thing itself is entirely credible.’
He may have an uphill battle convincing the American electorate of his claims, but the fact remains that Donald Trump’s loyalty to Vladimir Putin remains as curious as it is deeply worrying.
