Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Trump Says Putin Is Partly to Blame for Syrian Crisis

President Trump at Andrews Air Force Base on Sunday. “I really think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Russia to make sure that peace happens,” he said about Syria in a wide-ranging interview with Fox Business.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is partly to blame for the crisis in Syria and bears responsibility to help bring peace to the war-torn country, comments meant to increase pressure on the Kremlin as his secretary of state was in Moscow for a tense round of talks.

“I really think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Russia to make sure that peace happens, because frankly, if Russia didn’t go in and back this animal, we wouldn’t have a problem right now,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Putin’s support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

“Putin is backing a person that’s truly an evil person, and I think it’s very bad for Russia, I think it’s very bad for mankind, it’s very bad for this world,” Mr. Trump added during an interview with Fox Business that aired Wednesday morning.

His comments came as Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson was in Moscow for meetings with Russian leaders. Mr. Trump said his primary message to Russia was: “You should have peace in Syria; it’s enough.”

Mr. Trump also recounted the scene at his Mar-a-Lago club last week after he gave the order for American forces to carry out the missile strike on a Syrian airfield that had launched Mr. Assad’s chemical attack, then boasted about it over chocolate cake to President Xi Jinping of China, who was at the Florida estate for a summit meeting.

“I said, Mr. President, let me explain something to you — this was during dessert,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ve just fired 59 missiles, all of which hit, by the way, unbelievable, from, you know, hundreds of miles away, all of which hit, amazing. Brilliant. It’s so incredible. It’s brilliant. It’s genius.”

“He was eating his cake,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Xi, “and he was silent.”

Mr. Trump said Mr. Xi had asked his interpreter to repeat what he had said about the airstrike, and then said that he approved of the move.

“Anybody that was so brutal and uses gases to do that to young children and babies, it’s O.K.,” Mr. Trump said, describing Mr. Xi’s reaction. “He was O.K. with it.”

Turning to security questions in Asia, where a United States Navy aircraft carrier strike group is headed toward the Korean Peninsula in a show of force intended to deter North Korea from testing a sixth nuclear weapon or launching missiles, Mr. Trump declined to discuss his strategy for reining in the North.

“You never know, do you?” he said. “We are sending an armada — very powerful, and we have submarines — very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier,” he added, apparently referring to American submarines carrying ballistic nuclear missiles.

“He is doing the wrong thing,” Mr. Trump said of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.

Mr. Trump also used the interview to defend his allegation that President Barack Obama tapped his phones, arguing that his unfounded accusation has been vindicated since it was discovered that Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser, sought to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by United States spy agencies.

“When you look at Susan Rice and what’s going on, and so many people are coming up to me and apologizing now,” Mr. Trump said. “They say, ‘You know, you were right when you said that.’ Perhaps I didn’t know how right I was, because nobody knew the extent of it.”

Mr. Trump has said Ms. Rice’s actions may have been unlawful, an assertion his allies in the news media have frequently made but for which the president has provided no evidence. Current and former intelligence officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations have said they do not believe Ms. Rice’s actions were unusual or illegal.

In the interview, Mr. Trump also said James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director who is leading an investigation into his campaign’s potential ties with Russia, had helped Hillary Clinton, his 2016 Democratic presidential rival, avoid prosecution for her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

“When Jim Comey came out, he saved Hillary Clinton — he saved her life,” Mr. Trump said. “Director Comey was very, very good to Hillary Clinton. If he weren’t, she would be right now going to trial.”

He said he had kept Mr. Comey in his job “because I want to give everybody a good, fair chance.”

On domestic policy, Mr. Trump said he was making a second attempt to push through a broad health care overhaul before he turns to a sweeping tax rewrite, leaving the fate of both initiatives uncertain.

“It’s been very much misreported that we failed with health care,” Mr. Trump said. “We haven’t failed with health care; we’re negotiating, and we continue to negotiate.”

The president argued that the elimination of nearly $1 trillion in health care-related taxes as part of the health measure should be used to finance a package of individual and corporate tax cuts.

“We have to do health care first to pick up additional money, so that we get great tax reform,” Mr. Trump said.

He declined to weigh in on the inclusion of a 20-percent import tax known as a “border adjustment tax” in the plan, which is backed by many House Republicans. But Mr. Trump said the idea of some sort of tax at the border appealed to him as a way of creating a system that is fair to the United States.

“Let’s call it an import tax, let’s call it a reciprocal tax,” Mr. Trump said.

And he described what appeared to be an entirely new strategy for advancing his $1 trillion infrastructure plan, often discussed as a potential element of a tax cut plan. Mr. Trump said he was weighing adding it to the health care overhaul in order to draw enough Democratic support to push the health bill through the Senate, where 60 votes are required.

“I need 60 percent for that, and if I put that in, the Democrats are actually going to love the infrastructure plan,” Mr. Trump said.

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and in the Morning Briefing newsletter.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT