The entire exchange:
REPORTER: Mr. President, for Americans going to Washington on Saturday —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s going to be a great day.
REPORTER: What would you like folks to take away from that day? What would hope that they would remember? And also, Mr. President, and —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: How strong our military is, we have the strongest military in the world.
You know, it’s very interesting. Three weeks ago, it was the end of world — uh anniversary, end of World War II. And I called France and Macron — a good man.
I said, “What are you doing?”
He goes, “We’re celebrating World War II, our victory.”
I said “Your victory, your victory. Tell me about that.”
And then I called somebody else and I happened to speak to President Putin at the time. Now, in all fairness to him, he lost 51 million people, and he did fight.
Russia fought, sort of interesting, isn’t it? He fought with us at World War II and everybody hates him.
And Germany and Japan, they’re fine, you know. Someday somebody will explain that. But I like Germany and Japan, too.
But Putin is a little confused by that. You know, he said, we lost 51 million people, and we were your ally. And now everybody hates Russia, and they love Germany and Japan.”
I said, “Let’s explain that sometime, okay?”
But it’s a strange world.
But I will say this. Look, I want them to go away saying how great our country and how great our military is.
And I was making all these calls for some reason. I spoke to like four different places. “Sir, are you celebrating?”
And I said, you know, we won World War II and World War I, right? We won them. And yet we’re the only country that doesn’t celebrate. Everybody’s celebrating except us. And I said we should celebrate too.
I think Tom's interpretation is fair. It's easy to jumble up your pronouns a bit when you're talking a lot. Of course, during Biden's presidency, conservatives disingenuously insisted that every similar verbal slip-up from Biden was actually what Biden really believed (e.g. Biden
saying he plans to build a railroad "across the Indian Ocean" must mean that Biden actually thought he could build an underwater railroad spanning the entire Indian Ocean, rather than the more reasonable interpretation that Biden simply had meant "across
to the Indian Ocean"), but I won't stoop to such dishonest tactics. It's just a verbal slip-up.
The real problem with this exchange, and one that I hope won't be buried under a wave of "lol Trump thinks that Putin was alive and fighting during WWII!" is that this is yet another reminder of Trump's general ignorance and his malleability at Putin's hands. A few minutes on the relevant articles on Wikipedia would tell anybody who's willing to find out that the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, was a brutal, oppressive regime that killed far more innocent people than Hitler. The ethics of aligning with such a country, far from being taken for granted, are hotly debated by historians to this day. This is not obscure, niche stuff. It's pretty mainstream. And this would be bad enough if it was Trump once again embarrassing the country by stumbling onto a basic historical controversy and thinking that he's the first person to pose an obvious, sophomoric question, but as Trump tells us, it was Putin who brought this up, meaning that this is once again Putin manipulating Trump. And it's so childish. There really is no better word for it than that. Only a child would think that "But if Russia was our ally in WWII, shouldn't it be our ally now?" is a good, pertinent point.
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