Many senators returning from the summer recess distanced themselves from Trump’s comments praising the Russian president in a national security forum

One day after Donald Trump reiterated his admiration for Vladimir Putin, saying the Russian president was a better leader than Barack Obama, Republicans on Capitol Hill struggled to explain why their party’s presidential nominee was enamored with a man they have long cast as one of America’s primary foes.



Many Republicans who returned to Washington this week after the summer recess expressed confidence that Trump was improving as a candidate in both tone and message. But on Thursday, they found themselves in the familiar routine of distancing themselves from Trump’s comments – the latest being his praise for Putin in an NBC News national security forum held on Wednesday.

“If you’re running for leader of the free world and you’re expressing admiration for Putin, well then you’re losing me,” Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina and former Republican presidential candidate, told reporters.

“I think Vladimir Putin is a thug, a dictator, an autocratic ruler who has his opposition killed in the streets of Russia. He has dismembered his neighbor.”

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While Graham said he found Obama to be “weak”, “indecisive” and someone Putin had “walked all over”, the visibly frustrated senator added: “But no, I’m not going to say that Putin’s a better leader than a democratically elected president of the United States even though I have differences with him.”

It was just earlier this week that Graham, who has thus far declined to endorse Trump and has been among the candidate’s biggest critics, spoke positively for the first time of the direction his campaign had taken. After telling reporters on Monday that Trump would give Hillary Clinton “a hell of a race”, the senator hardly minced his words when reacting to Trump’s overtures toward Putin.

“This whole idea of admiring Putin is the biggest misunderstanding of a relationship in a person since Munich,” Graham said.

Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida who made his opposition to Putin a central tenet of his own presidential campaign, similarly disagreed with Trump’s assertion that the Russian president was a better leader than Obama.

“Look, I have tremendous policy disagreements with President Obama, but Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian thug who is accountable to no one,” Rubio told the Guardian.

“I don’t think what Vladimir Putin exhibits is leadership. I think what he exhibits is thuggery … and we should be clear-eyed about that,” he added, noting that Putin controlled the media, the military and often his political opponents were either imprisoned or found dead.

Asked by the Guardian if he was concerned that Trump had a penchant for commending Putin, despite those facts, Rubio said he was hopeful the candidate’s posture might evolve.

“My sense is those views will probably change once he understands better who Vladimir Putin truly is – that’s my hope,” responded the senator, who is backing Trump.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marco Rubio: ‘Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian thug who is accountable to no one.’ Photograph: Broadimage/Rex/Shutterstock

“At the end of the day, Hillary Clinton was part of the single biggest blunder ever when it came to Vladimir Putin, and that’s the reset with Russia.”

While Trump’s habit of making pro-Russia statements is not new, his refusal to adopt the GOP’s hard line against Putin has become a source of discomfort for Republicans.

Not only has his party argued that Russian military intervention in Ukraine would not have been possible had the Obama administration sufficiently stood up to Putin, but it has also cited Clinton’s role as former secretary of state to discredit her foreign policy experience.

But Trump, since becoming the nominee, has both continued to extol Putin’s leadership and even called on the Russian government in July to hack Clinton’s emails. While drafting the GOP platform at the Republican national convention in Cleveland, the Trump campaign also fought to eliminate language around arming Ukraine in its fight with Russia – bringing further scrutiny to the ties between Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager at the time, and pro-Russian interests. (Manafort was let go from the campaign last month.)

The paradox was palpable as many Republicans approached in the hallways of the Senate declined to address Trump’s latest string of pro-Putin comments.

John McCain of Arizona and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, both vulnerable Republican senators facing tough re-election battles, had nothing to say.

“You should ask Donald Trump about that,” Toomey said, while McCain simply stated his own opinion that Putin is “a murderer and a thug” but pointedly refused to discuss Trump.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the runner-up in the Republican presidential primary who memorably declined to endorse Trump at the convention in Cleveland, referred the Guardian to his press office. And two members of Senate Republican leadership – John Barrasso of Wyoming and John Cornyn of Texas – said they had not seen Trump’s remarks.

Asked directly if it was fair to say that Obama has been a better president for America than Putin has been for Russia, Cornyn demurred: “I’m not gonna go down that path.”

Bob Corker, the senator from Tennessee who chairs the Senate foreign relations committee, also initially said he was no longer responding to each one of Trump’s controversial statements. But when pressed by the Guardian about the implications of the mutual respect between Putin and Trump, if the latter was elected president, Corker acknowledged that “personal relationships end up affecting things”.

“We have national interests right now that are very different in many cases than those of Russia,” he said. “I think one has to be careful not to succumb to flattery.”

Earlier in the day, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, faced several questions pertaining to Trump’s appearance at the foreign policy town hall. The nation’s top Republican dubbed Putin as “an aggressor who does not share our interests” and suggested Russia was behind state-sponsored cyber-attacks “on what appears to be [the US] political system”.

But Ryan, too, reached his limit while fielding repeated queries about Trump.

“I’m not going to stand up here and do a tit-for-tat on what Donald said last night,” he said.