President Trump threatened to “bomb the s**t out of Moscow” if Russian President Putin attacked Ukraine, according to a new book.
The remark was among several captured in a series of audio tapes from 2024 fundraisers in New York and Florida. CNN aired the clips Tuesday night.
A trio of political journalists – Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf – obtained the tapes and have written about the exchanges in their new book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.
“With Putin I said, ‘If you go into Ukraine, I’m going to bomb the sh*t out of Moscow. I’m telling you I have no choice,” Trump said in the audio.
“And then [Putin] goes, like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ But he believed me 10%,” the President adds.
It’s not clear when the pair’s alleged conversation took place. The pair famously held a summit in Finland during Trump’s first term in office in July 2018.
Trump later claimed he gave a similar warning to Chinese President Xi Jinping over the potential invasion of Taiwan, telling him the U.S. would attack Beijing in retaliation, CNN reports.
“He thought I was crazy,” Trump said of Xi, adding that “we never had a problem.”
The president spoke of his conversations with Putin and Xi while claiming he could have prevented conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza if he had been president instead of Joe Biden – a notion he’s continued to peddle as he now tussles with ending both wars.
The fresh allegations come as Trump has been ramping up his criticism of Putin, including in May, when he accused the Russian leader of going “absolutely CRAZY.”
The commander-in-chief has maintained a cordial relationship with Putin over the past few years. However, the relationship seems to have soured in the first months of Trump’s second term.
“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump said in May. In a separate TruthSocial post, the president called Putin “crazy.”
At the June NATO summit in the Netherlands, Trump assured allies that he would support their mutual defense pledge, despite his previous criticisms of the organization.
“I stand with it. That’s why I’m here,” Trump said when asked to clarify his position on Article 5. “If I didn’t stand with it, I wouldn’t be here.”
This week, Trump expressed further frustration with Putin’s resistance to a peace deal, bemoaning that the Russian president was throwing “a lot of b******t” at the U.S.
“He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” he said.
Hours before, Trump promised to send Ukraine 10 Patriot missiles.
“We are going to have to send more weapons to Ukraine. Defensive weapons, they have to defend themselves,” Trump said Monday evening while meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelensky said Putin’s latest attack on Ukraine involved the “highest number of aerial attacks in a single day” after Russia launched 728 drones at Ukraine. Most were shot down, but some struck targets around the country.
When contacted for comment, Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told The Independent: “As President Trump has said time and again, Russia never dared invade Ukraine when he was in office. It happened only when Biden was in office. Thanks to this President’s leadership, America is once again the leader of the free world, and peace through strength is restored. President Trump won on an America First agenda, and he is working hard to implement the mandate the American people gave him.”
