Trump Nukes DeSantis in 2 Minute Video Screed for Calling Putin a War Criminal: ‘Ignorant and Foolish’

Former President Donald Trump released a new campaign video escalating his attacks on Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) – slamming the Florida Republican for taking a harder line against Russia’s Vladimir Putin in an interview last week.

“Calling Russia a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons, or calling Putin, quote, ‘an authoritarian gas station attendant with some legacy of nuclear weapons from the old Soviet Union’ is exactly the kind of simple-minded thinking that has produced decades of failed diplomacy and ultimately war,” Trump said in the video posted to his Truth Social platform late Wednesday night.

“And where is that war going? Those such as Mitt Romney and Ron DeSantis, very much alike, who insist on arrogantly treating Russia as deeply inferior to the other nations of the world with no history or culture or pride, are not only ignorant and foolish, but their attitude makes it impossible to negotiate peace. Absolutely impossible,” Trump added, concluding:

Under my administration, we were tough on Russia, tougher than any administration before. But we also demonstrated respect for Russia and the Russian people. We demonstrated understanding for Russian history and the fact that Russia lost over 20 million lives in World War II. They were fighting with us.

This kind of neocon rhetoric mocking Russia’s nuclear weapons, along with implying that Putin must be tried and presumably executed as a war criminal, only increases the chance of deadly nuclear escalation. Fundamentally, it shows a lack of depth, a lack of seriousness and a lack of sophistication on the subtleties and complexities of foreign policy. You can’t do certain things and end up with peace. This is not the time for an on the job training as we face the possibility of nuclear war. And our leaders, if you call them, that, got us there. This is where we are. The word nuclear was never even mentioned during the Trump administration.

Now it’s being mentioned every hour of every day. We need a statesman and a peacemaker in the White House, not someone who recites mindless and recycled talking points to win the approval of the failed foreign policy establishment that didn’t know what they were doing. In 2024, I am the only candidate who can prevent World War III. I will prevent World War III. There’s nobody else that’s going to do that. Thank you very much.

Trump’s campaign released a short clip last week linking DeSantis’s remarks about Russia to late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT).

In the short video, McCain can be heard saying, “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.”
Romney is then shown saying, “John McCain famously opined that Russia is a gas station parading as a country.”

Finally, DeSantis is shown saying of Putin that “He’s basically a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons.”

Meghan McCain was not amused with the political attack using her late father, a Vietnam War hero, and shared the video with the simply replied: “GROW. UP.”

Notably, Trump’s 2024 campaign continues to attack DeSantis on foreign policy by tying him to the two Republican presidential nominees prior to Trump.

DeSantis had previously characterized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” in a written statement to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, which received a lot of blowback from Republicans.

DeSantis walked back those remarks in an interview last week with Piers Morgan on Fox Nation, taking a much harder line against Russia and claiming his initial statement was taken out of context.

“What I’m referring to is where the fighting is going on now, which is that eastern border region Donbas, and then Crimea, and you have a situation where Russia has had that. I don’t think legitimately, but they had,” DeSantis told Morgan when asked about the “territorial dispute.”

“There’s a lot of ethnic Russians there. So, that’s some difficult fighting, and that’s what I was referring to, and so it wasn’t that I thought Russia had a right to that, and so if I should have made that more clear, I could have done it,” DeSantis added, calling Putin a “war criminal.”

The Trump War Room jab at DeSantis further highlights the divide in the GOP over the war in Ukraine between the more establishment, traditional conservative position and a more isolationist, nativist-leaning base.

Watch the full clip above.

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