Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence sided with Donald Trump Thursday and declared it “inarguable” that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader than President Barack Obama.
In an interview with CNN, Pence doubled down on Trump’s comments during Wednesday’s Commander in Chief Forum.
“I think it’s inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country,” Pence said. “That’s going to change the day that Donald Trump becomes president of the United States of America.”
During Wednesday’s forum, Trump argued that in the Russian governmental system, Putin is a much stronger leader than Obama, pointing out that he isn’t a big fan of that style of government.
“Certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader,” Trump told NBC’s Matt Lauer. Pence piggybacked on Trump.
“Donald Trump said last night he doesn’t particularly like the system,” Pence said.
Pence also defended Trump’s claim that the U.S. military generals have been “reduced to rubble” over the past eight years.
“I think he was talking about the Commander in Chief reducing the influence of generals to rubble,” Pence said, adding that Trump was pointing out what he found out in a classified briefing, referring to a “sense that he got recently that in fact our President had not taken all of the counsel of our military advisers in confronting and defeating ISIS.”
“I think the American people are deeply troubled at a foreign policy and a military policy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that has caused the wider Middle East to literally spin out of control,” Pence said. “We’ve seen civil war in Syria, civil war in Libya. We’ve seen entire areas of Iraq that were won by the American soldiers become compromised.”
Pence also declined to delve into Trump’s “secret plan” to defeat ISIS, which has come under scrutiny in recent days, telling Bash that he would like to “keep our private conversations private.”
