President Donald Trump has lashed out at his former national security adviser and “very unfair” media who have warned that he may be entering a trap at his high-stakes meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
In an angry tirade on Wednesday morning, Trump accused the press of conspiring against him in the lead up to Friday’s Russia summit, claiming the “fake news” was “working overtime” to give him less than favorable coverage.
He also referred to St. Petersburg by its Soviet-era name “Leningrad,” prompting mockery across social media.
“Very unfair media is at work on my meeting with Putin,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.
“Constantly quoting fired losers and really dumb people like John Bolton, who just said that, even though the meeting is on American soil, “Putin has already won.” What’s that all about? We are winning on EVERYTHING.
“The Fake News is working overtime… If I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal!”
Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser during his first administration, but was ousted in 2019 amid disputes over how to handle major foreign policy challenges like Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.
In recent days, he and other analysts have characterized the summit as a strategic win for Putin, and warned that the Russian president may be laying a trap to “bring things back in his direction” over Ukraine.
“I think Putin knows he pushed Trump sort of beyond the envelope, and he‘s going to try and roll him back in, using all of his best KGB training,” Bolton told CNN on Tuesday night’s The Source.
“I think from Putin‘s point of view, in an ideal world, he would get Trump talking about his draft, quote unquote, peace plan and maybe even get Trump to adopt it as his.”
Trump’s historic meeting with Putin will take place on Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on the northern edge of Anchorage, Alaska.
It will be the first time the top U.S. and Russian leaders have met in more than four years, and a critical juncture for Trump, who came to office repeatedly promising he could end the war in Ukraine on “day one” of his presidency.
Since then, he has become increasingly frustrated with Putin’s refusal to negotiate a genuine ceasefire, even acknowledging in May that his Russian counterpart was feeding him “bulls–t.”
But after initially framing the summit as peace talks, Trump now says he is approaching the meeting as a “feel-out” session, essentially lowering expectations in the event that it does not achieve genuine progress in ending the war.
The White House on Tuesday softened its language even further, suggesting it was merely a “listening exercise.”
“I think the President of the United States getting in the room with the President of Russia, sitting face to face, rather than speaking over the telephone, will give this president the best indication of how to end this war,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday.
Trump’s angry social media post against Bolton and the “Fake News” came as one of his international allies, Hungary President Viktor Orban, mitigated the importance of the summit by declaring Russia had already won.
“We are talking now as if this were an open-ended war situation, but it is not. The Ukrainians have lost the war. Russia has won this war,” Orban told the ‘Patriot’ YouTube channel in an interview.
“The only question is when and under what circumstances will the West, who are behind the Ukrainians, admit that this has happened and what will result from all this.”
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