Latest Trump-Putin Bromance Revelations Sizzle—But Will Trump Get Burned?
Plus: Why the “Russia hoax” was no hoax at all.
IF YOU HAD “TRUMP/RUSSIA REDUX” on your October Surprise bingo card, you’re in luck.
In his new book, War, veteran journalist Bob Woodward reports that Donald Trump has secretly stayed in touch with Vladimir Putin since leaving office, with as many as seven telephone conversations—including one in early 2024. Woodward also asserts that in 2020, then-President Trump sent Putin several COVID-19 testing machines, which were then in short supply, and that Putin told him to keep it a secret because “because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Caution is in order. Woodward acknowledges that his source for the alleged post-presidency phone chats is a single unnamed aide, and that he was unable to verify it with other sources. The New York Times contacted “twenty current and former Trump and Biden administration officials and career intelligence officials,” none of whom had any knowledge of Trump/Putin contacts after Trump left the White House—though “several said it was not inconceivable.”
Trump himself has yet to comment. Trump campaign communications director Stephen Cheung, doing a passable imitation of his boss, released an email statement calling Woodward, among other things, “a truly demented and deranged man,” “an angry little man,” and “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.” Vice presidential candidate JD Vance, in response to a question about Woodward’s reporting, slammed Woodward as a “hack.” He also averred that he had never talked to Trump about any phone calls with Putin—and that if such phone calls did take place, it was fine. “Even if it’s true,” he asked, “look, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?”
Actually, yes. There is something wrong with conducting diplomacy if you don’t represent the government of the United States, at least without clearance from the White House or the State Department—especially if you’re talking to an acknowledged adversary of the United States, and even more so if you’re a presidential candidate in opposition to the current president of the United States. Do we know that Trump wasn’t talking to Putin during the period in 2023 when he was arm-twisting congressional Republicans into holding up military aid Ukraine desperately needed?
The danger posed by private individuals going rogue and undermining the U.S. government is precisely why Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Logan Act in 1799, making it a crime to conduct foreign policy on behalf of the United States without authorization. (No one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the Logan Act, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the law.)
Notably, no one has yet issued a straightforward denial of Woodward’s account—unless you count Cheung’s blanket assertion that “none of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true.” The lack of specific denials strengthens the thinly sourced report and revives the public attention to Trump/Russia connection.
Moreover, Woodward isn’t the only one revisiting old questions about Trump and Putin. On October 5, the Times published an article examining the origins of Trump’s hostility toward Ukraine—and, relatedly, his interactions with Putin. Some of this material has long been known: Trump believes that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on Hillary Clinton’s behalf and that the hacked Democratic National Committee server was owned by a company in Ukraine. But there’s also new reporting with several high-level sources including Fiona Hill, who served on the National Security Council staff under Trump.
In particular, the Times reveals that when Trump had his first telephone conversation with Putin on January 28, 2017, he asked Putin for his opinion on Ukraine—where, at that moment, Putin was already waging a covert war in the east via separatist proxies. Putin’s response was a lengthy monologue about the scourge of Ukrainian corruption. Trump reportedly listened without agreeing or disagreeing, but, according to the Times source, “acknowledged that Russia’s dispute with Ukraine was an obstacle to his goal of improving relations with Moscow.”
One detail the Times doesn’t mention: The next day, Russian-backed forces in Eastern Ukraine launched an assault on the town of Avdiivka. Let’s not get too conspiratorial and assume that Putin felt emboldened to attack after talking to Trump. (While the Donbas insurgents were Kremlin-controlled and many of their commanders had ties to Russian intelligence, we don’t know to what extent Putin was personally involved in managing these operations.) It is, however, a useful reminder that Putin felt no compunction about prosecuting his war in Ukraine on Trump’s watch.
The Times article also focuses on Trump’s visit to Europe in July 2017. On July 6, in Warsaw, Trump delivered a fairly tough message to Russia to “cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine.” The next day, in Hamburg, Putin turned his first summit with Trump into a “master class” in manipulation.
According to Hill, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson contemporaneously described the conversation as Putin doing his “KGB shtick.” Putin’s pitch portrayed Ukraine as a corrupt and “fabricated” country and defended Russia’s right to intervene in Ukraine to protect Russian speakers, reportedly even drawing a parallel to Trump idol Theodore Roosevelt justifying U.S. interventions in Latin America. To Tillerson’s dismay, Trump—who had been briefed on talking points to counter such arguments—did not push back. What he did was tell Putin that his administration was considering giving Ukraine weapons, and then ask, “What do you think?”
“A mistake,” Putin told him.
THIS NEW INSTALLMENT in the Trump/Putin chronicles (the world’s worst buddy movie) revives the issue of “Russiagate” and the 2016 election, or what Trump and his fans call “the Russia collusion hoax.” If you’ve read the April 2019 report by special counsel Robert Mueller or the August 2020 report of the bipartisan (and Republican-led) Senate Intelligence Committee, you know that there was no “hoax.” Russian agents did, almost certainly on Putin’s orders, meddle in the election, both through social media propaganda warfare and through a hack-and-leak operation targeting the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, facilitated by the WikiLeaks “media organization.” Senior Trump aides, possibly with Trump’s knowledge, actively sought to coordinate with WikiLeaks on the timing of its releases, and Trump mentioned those releases at 56 campaign events in October and early November 2020, gushing over WikiLeaks as “a treasure trove.” (I have examined the “collusion hoax” narrative in detail in two articles for The Bulwark.)
How much influence Russian meddling had on the outcome of the 2016 election is likely unknowable. Pro-Trump (and anti-anti-Trump) pundits love to snark at the notion that a few Facebook ads and a gaggle of Russian trolls and bots threw the election to Trump; but it is entirely possible that the WikiLeaks disclosures, dishonestly spun to suggest that Clinton robbed Bernie Sanders of the Democratic nomination, moved the needle in close races in battleground states.
Some Democrats made overwrought and irresponsible claims, alleging that the election was stolen or that Trump was an agent of Russian intelligence, and some progressive pundits and media outlets were guilty of sloppiness and sensationalism about Russiagate.
Nonetheless, all the evidence points to the fact that Putin’s Russia conducted an election influence campaign, that the Kremlin correctly saw Trump as easily manipulated, and that Trump and his aides had no qualms about using Russian interference to their advantage while publicly denying or minimizing its existence.
There is also plenty of evidence that Putin tried it again in 2020. The MAGA right loves to tout the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was widely dismissed as a likely Russian disinformation operation but was ultimately authenticated. But guess what: There really was a Kremlin disinformation effort to use Hunter Biden to smear his father! A shady Soviet-born Israeli-American businessman is currently awaiting trial for feeding the FBI a fake story during the 2020 election tying Hunter and Joe Biden to a multimillion-dollar corruption scheme involving Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden was a board member. The rogue informant, Alexander Smirnov, says the fake information came from “officials associated with Russian intelligence.”
In 2024, the stakes are much higher. We don’t know whether Trump has really been chatting with Putin from Mar-a-Lago; tempting though it is, the Woodward report remains uncorroborated. But there are plenty of reasons to believe that Putin’s current strategy in Ukraine is to wait for a Trump victory in November, in the hope that Ukraine will be starved of aid and forced into a bad (temporary) peace.
It’s true that actual U.S. policies during Trump’s White House tenure were not always Russia-friendly. Indeed, a few months after the Hamburg summit, Trump did greenlight the delivery of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, reportedly after much resistance and persuasion. But there is plenty of evidence that tough-on-Russia, Ukraine-friendly policies under the Trump administration were the result of pressure from the “adults in the room”—among them Tillerson, Hill, and H.R. McMaster, whose memoir, At War with Ourselves, published in August, also mentions Putin’s manipulation of Trump in Hamburg. As the recent Times story notes, there was dissonance throughout Trump’s term between the administration and the president, who continued to push MAGA-hatched and Putin-stoked anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories.
If there’s a second Trump term, the adults in the room won’t be there, and Putin’s gambit may well pay off.