President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did not agree on a cease-fire to the war in Ukraine during their meeting in Alaska. But they did agree on something else: They both despise Joe Biden.
During their private meeting and their public appearance in Anchorage on Friday, both leaders blamed Mr. Biden for the war in Ukraine, never mind that Mr. Putin was the one who ordered troops to invade his neighbor and keeps authorizing strikes against civilian targets.
The Russian president complained that Mr. Biden did not accede to Russian demands before the full-scale invasion three and a half years ago, and he played to the current president’s ego by agreeing that the war would not have happened had Mr. Trump still been in office in 2022. By Mr. Trump’s account, Mr. Putin behind closed doors also endorsed the lie that Mr. Trump actually won the 2020 election, only to have it stolen by Democrats.
“I think that he respects our country now,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin during a post-summit interview on Fox News. “He didn’t respect it under Biden, I can tell you that. He had no respect for it. I was so happy when he said this would have never happened. This — all those lives would be saved if they had a competent — if we had a competent president.”
It was unorthodox, to say the least, to see a sitting American president join a foreign dictator accused of war crimes onstage in Anchorage to bash a former American president. But it underscored that Mr. Trump, with his increasingly authoritarian tendencies, in some ways finds more common ground with the repressive leader of Russia than he does with his own country’s leaders.
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