Former President Donald Trump has not been holding back against his political opponents in recent days.
SO WHAT
Is Trump gearing up to once again make America great?
THE QUOTES
The Russia-Ukraine war and a media blitz by his erstwhile Attorney General William Barr brought out the beast in Trump.
ON BARR: “I would imagine that if the book is anything like him, it will be long, slow and very boring,” Trump wrote in a letter to Lester Holt before the “NBC Nightly News” anchor’s interview with Barr aired Monday.
- “Bill Barr cares more about being accepted by the corrupt Washington Media and Elite than serving the American people,” Trump added in the March 2 missive, published by Axios.
In the interview, Barr said he had told Trump “that all this stuff was bullsh*t … about [2020 presidential] election fraud. It was wrong to be shoveling it out the way his team was.”
- Barr also suggested his former boss was responsible for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack but said he would vote for Trump if he were the 2024 GOP presidential nominee.
- On Tuesday, Barr published a memoir about his days in the Trump and George H.W. Bush administrations.
ON MILITARY STRATEGY: Trump jokingly told GOP donors at a fundraising summit this weekend that the U.S. should paint Chinese flags on its fighter jets and “bomb the sh*t” out of Russia, according to audio obtained by The Washington Post.
- “And then we say, ‘China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it,’ and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch,” he said, to laughs from the crowd.
ON DEALING WITH RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: Footage of a phone call between Trump and pro golfer John Daly, posted to social media Tuesday, showed the former president saying he had threatened Putin as president. View this post on Instagram
“They’re all saying, ‘Oh he’s a nuclear power,’“ Trump said of Putin during the call. “It’s like they’re afraid of him.”
- “You know, he was a friend of mine,” Trump added. “I got along great with him. I say, ‘Vladimir, if you do it, we’re hitting Moscow. I said, ‘We’re gonna hit Moscow.'”
- The former president also said Putin “sort of believed me” and “never did it during my time, because he knew he couldn’t,” referencing Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.