On eve of crunch summit, US president says he assumes his Russian counterpart is ruthless but that other people are too

Donald Trump has again voiced his admiration for strongmen leaders, saying North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has a “great personality” and that he could “probably get along very well” with Vladimir Putin.

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The US president made his remarks in an interview during his visit to the UK, shortly before he leaves for Helsinki to meet the Russian president for a one-on-one summit.

Claiming a great victory over his earlier meeting with Kim, despite suggestions of a lack of progress on issues including denuclearisation and the repatriation of war dead, Trump said: “When I got in, we took a different approach and there was plenty of testing and plenty of nuclear tests going off and missiles going up and rockets going up ... And in the last nine months, there have been no missiles tests, no nuclear tests; there’s been no nothing.”

Asked if he liked Kim personally, he said: “I get along with him great, yeah. He’s very smart, great personality, he’s funny and tough, good negotiator.”

Some of Trump’s recent efforts at nuclear detente on the Korean Peninsula appear to point towards appealing to Kim’s sense of humour. He has gifts for the regime leader including a signed (by Trump) CD of Elton John’s Rocket Man hit, reflecting one of the president’s favoured insults for Kim.

Trump’s reply when interviewer Piers Morgan tells him Kim is a “ruthless dictator”, was sanguine: “Sure he is, he’s ruthless, but so are others. I mean, I could name plenty of others that we deal with that you don’t say the same thing about. I mean plenty of the people that I deal with are pretty ruthless people.”

Trump deployed the same reasoning when speaking about Putin, saying he assumes his Russian counterpart is ruthless but that other people are, too. In contrast to his comments on Kim, he downplays the depth of any relationship with Putin – possibly not a surprise given the unfolding saga of the various Trump-Russia inquiries: “Look, if we can get along with Russia that’s a good thing. I don’t know him [Putin]. I met him a couple of times, I met him at the G20.

“I think we could probably get along very well. Somebody said ‘are you friends or enemies?’ I said ‘well it’s too early to say but right now I say we’re competitors’.”

The president emphasised, as he has done before, that getting along with Russia and China is “a really good thing”, a remark at odds with his administration’s recent threat to add punitive tariffs on a further $200bn of Chinese goods as part of a growing trade war.

US senators and 18 Democratic members of the House committee on foreign affairs have called on Trump to abort the meeting with Putin. “Unfortunately,” the House group wrote, “due to your constant expressions of sympathy for Vladimir Putin, your conflicts of interest, and your attacks on our closest allies, we do not have confidence that you can faithfully negotiate with the Russian leader, and we urge you to cancel the meeting.”

The sentiment was echoed by other Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House, said: “President Trump’s continued refusal to condemn the Russians’ attacks on our democracy, even after special counsel Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officials for interfering in the 2016 election, makes it clear that meeting with Putin would be both pointless and dangerous.”

Trump has dismissed Mueller’s investigation as a “witch-hunt” and never condemned Putin over election interference despite the findings of US intelligence agencies. This week he said he would bring up the issue when the two meet. “He may deny it,” Trump told reporters in Brussels. “I mean, it’s one of those things. So all I can do is say, ‘Did you?’ and ‘Don’t do it again.’”



