Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently blasted former President Donald Trump for acting like a “boy” around the “captain of the football team” when face-to-face with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in an appearance on Australian TV earlier this week via Mediaite.
“The Republican Party under Donald Trump, and particularly the right wing of the Republican Party, are very sympathetic to Vladimir Putin. I mean, I’ve been with Trump and Putin: Trump is in awe of Putin,” began Turnbull, who served as Australian prime minister from September 2015 until August 2018.
“When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s [Trump] like the 12-year-old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. My hero! It is really creepy. It’s really creepy.”
It’s worth noting that Turnbull has previously described Trump as a bully and a “natural isolationist.”
“Whether it was east Asia or the Middle East, Trump’s perspective was thoroughly dystopian. Everyone hated each other, had done for centuries and wasn’t going to change. So the less the US had to do with them the better,” wrote Turnbull in a column for The Guardian in which he also submitted that the United States’ “influence” was “diminished” under Trump’s leadership.
Trump has long been accused of being sympathetic to Putin’s Russia and the murderous authoritarian himself. Although the policies of his administration were relatively hostile to Putin’s interests, his penchant for praising the dictator and perhaps most notably his vote of confidence in him at a press conference in Helsinki in 2018 have fueled those critiques.
On the campaign trail earlier this month, Trump said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that don’t spend enough on defense.
“You got to pay your bills,” insisted Trump.
The former president has also suggested that he would quickly end the war between Russia and Ukraine if he retakes the White House, but has not outlined how he would go about doing so.
