President Trump expressed no reservations about his meetings and subsequent press conference Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
While criticism from both sides of the aisle piled on throughout the day, particularly in response to Trump openly expressing doubt about Russia meddling in the 2016 election, the president told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in an interview recorded right after his press conference with Putin that he thought the day went “great.”
“We were in a very long meeting, and it was good meeting,” Trump said. “We discussed so many different things, including nuclear, including war and peace, including economic, Syria, Ukraine. We discussed many, many things, and at the end of a long period of time, I mean, there was really a lot it was just the two of us and interpreters. And at the end of this meeting, I think we really came to a lot of good conclusions.”
[More: Trump to Putin: ‘The world wants to see us get along‘]
Not five hours earlier, Trump said he thought the situation between the U.S. and Russia was “really bad,” but that the meeting helped to turn things around.
“Oh, I think it was great today, but I think it was really bad five hours ago. I think we really had a potential problem. Now thinking, we’re two nuclear nations, 90 percent of the nuclear power in the world between these two nations, and we’ve had a phony, witch hunt deal drive us apart,” he said, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
But in spite of Trump’s positive outlook, Trump’s joint press conference with Putin sparked outrage from both sides of the aisle, including some longtime Trump supporters, as he cast doubt on whether he believed the Russian government meddled in the 2016 U.S. election and told reporters that Putin said the Russian government was not to blame, all despite a U.S. intelligence community assessment that determined last year that Russia agents were responsible for interfering in the election.
For instance, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the press conference “was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”
Another Republican senator took issue with Trump’s statements that the U.S. was partly responsible for a strained relationship with Russia. “I never thought I would see the day when our American President would stand on the stage with the Russian President and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression,” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., tweeted. “This is shameful.”
Former Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that Trump’s remarks were “indefensible,” and argued that Trump “surrendered lock, stock and barrel to President Putin’s deceptions about the attacks on America’s democracy.”
“I’ve been involved in public life for six decades,” Kerry said in a statement Monday evening. “I have never seen an American president do or say anything remotely like what President Trump did today. No one else has, either, and everyone knows it. It is more than unfortunate; it is indefensible.”
Even staunch Trump ally Newt Gingrich found fault in Trump’s performance during the press conference, calling it the “most serious mistake of his presidency.”
A while after the press conference, Trump tweeted that he maintains confidence in the U.S. intelligence community and stressed that he’d prefer to keep an exclusive focus on the past to “build a brighter future.”
As I said today and many times before, “I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people.” However, I also recognize that in order to build a brighter future, we cannot exclusively focus on the past – as the world’s two largest nuclear powers, we must get along! #HELSINKI2018
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2018
