Putin says he prefers Biden to Trump in the White House
He says he’s more experienced. He’s more predictable. He doesn’t think his age or mental acuity are a problem.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday in an interview on his country’s state TV that he’d rather have Joe Biden, 81, in the White House than Donald Trump, 77, because the former was an “old-school” politician.
They were Putin’s first public comments on this year’s U.S. presidential election. Russia’s leader often makes unreliable and contradictory statements that mask and distort his positions and intentions in order to sow chaos.
Still, Putin’s remarks come amid growing tensions between Democrats and Republicans over the Biden administrations’s efforts to send more military aid to Ukraine as Moscow’s invasion nears the two-year mark.
Ukraine is running out of weapons.Is it also running low on the time-tested coping mechanism of humor?
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They also follow comments made by Trump that he would “encourage” Russia to attack NATO members who don’t meet the U.S.-led military alliance’s financial contribution targets, set at 2% of a nation’s GDP.
U.S. officials warned Wednesday of a “serious national security threat” involving Russia’s alleged attempts to deploy nuclear weapons into space. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday dismissed that suggestion as a political “trick” by the White House, though he did not elaborate what he meant by that.
Putin: ‘Who hasn’t banged their head on something?’
In the state TV interview, Putin said he was ultimately prepared to “work with any U.S. leader who wins the trust of the American people.” But he said a Biden presidency would be better for Russia because the current U.S. leader “was a more experienced person, he is predictable, he is a politician of the old-school.”
Putin said when he last met Biden in Geneva in 2021 he had not noticed anything peculiar about his sharpness and that those who say Biden is not fit for office because of his age reflect a “vicious” U.S. election campaign.
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Biden is not only the first octogenarian in the Oval Office, his relative seniority puts him among the 5% of world leaders who are in their 80s, according to Pew Research. Concerns about his advancing years and mental fitness have dogged him and polls have shown the majority of Americans think he is tool old to serve another term.
“Even then people were saying that he was incompetent, but I did not see anything of this sort,” Putin said. “Yes, he was peeking at his notes from time to time, but, frankly speaking, I was peeking at mine as well. So he banged his head on his helicopter when he was getting out of it − who hasn’t banged their head on something?”
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