“I will address this before I become president. If I am elected, what I will do as president-elect is to talk to one person, talk to another person, and bring them together,” he continued.
Then Muir asked him again: “Just to clarify the question, do you think it is in the interest of the United States that Ukraine win this war? Yes or no?”
And Donald Trump added: “I think it’s in America’s interest to end this war, to end it. (…) negotiate a deal. Because we have to stop this destruction of human life.”
Trump was also very direct about Russia’s nuclear deterrence, a topic that Biden and most other U.S. leaders have avoided, and he pointed out that in his view, Putin is not worth cornering.
“He has one thing that other people don’t. He has a nuclear weapon. They never talk about it. He has a nuclear weapon,” the Republican candidate repeated. “Nobody thinks about it. And eventually he might use it. Maybe he wasn’t that threatening. But he has this. It’s something we don’t even want to talk about. Nobody likes to talk about it.”
Despite Harris and Biden’s support for Ukraine, Trump is saying loudly what at least some members of the current administration are saying quietly: that a negotiated end to the war could ultimately be in the best interest of all parties.
This article was first published in English by POLITICO and was edited in French by Jean-Christophe Catalon.
