One of Donald Trump’s long-time enemies said this week that comments he made recently suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin has a secret financial hold on the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.
During an appearance on MSNBC recently, anchor Jen Psaki — who once served as the White House press secretary for President Joe Biden — asked former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about how Trump reacted to news of the death of Alexey Navalny, who led the opposition political party in Russia.
Navalny died while being held in a Russian prison camp in Siberia. Many world leaders, including Biden, are holding Putin directly responsible for his death.
Psaki said she was surprised that it took Trump three days to comment on the situation. When he finally did, Trump didn’t condemn Putin at all, deciding instead to compare Navalny’s death to the legal problems he’s facing.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said Navalny’s death “has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country.”
He added:
“It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”
Asked to respond to that, Pelosi said the statement was “beneath the dignity of a human being” and should also “disqualify him from running for anything, much less president of the United States.”
She continued:
“You wonder, what does Putin have on Donald Trump that he always has to be beholden to him, his buddy … in vileness?”
Recently, Trump has made negative comments about NATO on multiple occasions recently. At a rally held on February 10 in South Carolina, he went as far as saying he’d “encourage (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want” to any member of NATO that didn’t meet a commitment of defense spending that was equal to 2% of their GDP.
That sparked a lot of concern that if Trump were elected president in November, he might try to pull the U.S. out of NATO completely.
Pelosi continued to double down on her statements about this, saying:
“What does he (Putin) have on Donald Trump that he would have to constantly be catering to Putin, telling Putin, go into these countries, NATO countries?
“I don’t know what he has on him, but I think it’s probably financial. I think it’s probably financial, either something financial he has on him or something that he expects to get.”
Pelosi has consistently attacked Trump, and vice versa, leading up to the November election. The former Democratic leader of the House during Trump’s time in the White House is doing everything she can to convince voters not to go to his side.
Trump’s team has fired back, with Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesperson for Trump, issuing a statement about Pelosi that said:
“Does Nancy Pelosi know where she is half the time? … Under President Trump there was peace and prosperity.”
