Trump Claims He’s the Putin Whisperer: ‘I Was the Apple of His Eye’

Donald Trump has offered a bizarre new reason for why he claims Vladimir Putin would have never launched his full-scale war against Ukraine if he were still in charge. “I was the apple of his eye,” the quadruply indicted former president said in an interview with Fox Business aired Friday. “Putin would have never gone into Ukraine, but that was just on my relationship with him, my personality over his,” he said. Trump has repeatedly made such claims and asserted that he could “end that war in one day” by forcing Ukraine to “make a deal.” On the eve of the Kremlin’s launch of the war in February 2022, Trump praised Putin’s moves in eastern Ukraine as “savvy” in comments on the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius,’” he said.