Donald Trump doubled down on Tuesday by comparing his criminal charges to the circumstances of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, the main political opponent of Russian autocratic leader Vladimir Putin, who died in a remote Arctic prison after being jailed by the Kremlin leader.
Appearing at a Fox News Channel town hall pre-recorded before a live audience in Greenville, South Carolina, Trump lamented Navalny’s death, which President Joe Biden and other Western leaders have blamed on Putin. Trump then turned on himself and repeated his claims that the prosecutions against him are motivated by politics, despite there being no evidence that Biden or the White House ordered them.
“Navalny is in a very sad situation and he is very courageous, he was a very courageous man,” Trump said in response to a question from Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham. “He went back, he could have stayed away, and honestly it probably would have been a lot better to stay away and talk from outside the country, rather than having to go back in because people thought that could happen , and it happened. .
“And it’s a terrible thing, but it’s happening in our country too,” Trump continued, suggesting that his criminal charges — including two cases stemming from his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat — are proof that the U.S. “turns into a communist country”. country in many ways.”
“I’ve been indicted four times…all for being in politics,” Trump said. “They charged me for things that are so ridiculous.”
He expanded the comparison to his loss in a civil fraud trial last week, in which a New York judge ordered Trump to pay $355 million in fines after finding he had lied about his wealth for years.
“It’s a form of Navalny,” Trump said. “It is a form of communism, of fascism.”
When asked whether he would post a bond to cover the verdict, a requirement for an appeal, he did not give a clear answer.
Trump made no mention of Putin, part of his long-standing pattern of refusing to denounce and often compliment the Russian leader since he was in the White House. But his comments come as Republicans in the House of Representatives have refused to give Ukraine more money to defend against Russia’s invasion, and as many in the Republican Party are increasingly accepting of Russian expansionism.
Putin recently suggested he preferred Biden to Trump in the White House. US intelligence assessments of both the 2016 and 2020 elections found that Russia was behind influence operations to boost Trump at the expense of his Democratic Party opponents.
Ingraham interrupted Trump at the town hall on Tuesday to ask whether he believed he could become a “potential political prisoner” for the rest of his life, like Navalny. Trump sidestepped the question.
“If I lost at the polls, they wouldn’t even talk about me and I wouldn’t have had any legal fees,” he replied. “If I were free, I think – even though they hate me so much, I think if I were to get out, they would still say, ‘let’s chase this man, we can’t stand this man.’”
The Fox town hall, taped and broadcast Tuesday afternoon during Ingraham’s primetime hour on the network, marked Trump’s first extended comments about Navalny since Russian officials announced his death. The town hall came four days before Trump faces Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina.
Ingraham started the discussion by offering Trump, who has praised Putin for years as a strong leader, a chance to clarify his only previous public reference to Navalny’s downfall. In a social media post 72 hours after Russian officials confirmed Navalny had died, Trump broke his silence without naming Putin or Navalny’s family.
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me increasingly aware of what is happening in our country,” he wrote before blasting “COOKED, radical left politicians, prosecutors and judges who are leading us on a path to destruction” and his false statements repeated. claims that the US elections are riddled with fraud.
