Former ABC News reporter Terry Moran said President Donald Trump’s “alpha male” act dissolves on contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Moran, who was fired from the network for describing Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as “world-class” haters, made the claim about Trump’s handling of Putin on CNN’s NewsNight on the eve of the president’s summit with Putin in Alaska on Friday.
“There’s something about Trump and Putin from the beginning. I was in Helsinki as well,” Moran said, referring to Trump’s 2018 summit with Putin in the Finnish capital, where Trump sided with the Kremlin leader over his own intelligence agencies that said Russia intervened in the 2016 election.
“Trump is an alpha male in every room until Vladimir Putin is there. I was there. You could feel it in the room,” Moran said, “Now, I’m not saying that Putin has anything on him, but I think there’s no question that he has trouble with this guy,” Moran added.
Trump and Putin are set to meet for a summit in Anchorage on Friday in what could be crucial talks to convince Russia to end its war in Ukraine.
However, there have been concerns that Putin will be completely unwilling to agree a peace deal, and that Trump will not keep up his newfound tough-guy stance toward his Russian counterpart during their face-to-face negotiations.
Trump, who long vowed to end the Russia–Ukraine conflict within 24 hours of returning to the White House, has even admitted there is a “25 percent” chance that the talks will be not successful in reaching an agreement to end the three-and-a-half-year war.
Trump and Putin will also hold a press conference after their talks on Friday, which could evoke memories of the last time they appeared at a podium together in Helsinki in 2018.
The most controversial moment of the Helsinki press conference came when Trump rejected assessment from U.S. intelligence agencies and said Putin had convinced him that Russia had nothing to do with attempts to influence the 2016 election.
“President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Trump said.
Elsewhere on CNN’s Newsnight, former MSNBC host Tiffany Cross said she had to “respectfully disagree” with Moran’s assessment that Trump can be considered an alpha male.
“You can call him an alpha male, depending on your definition of what an alpha male is. He’s not an alpha male to me, he’s a very insecure, little person,” she said.
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