Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) said on Monday that she hopes President Donald Trump will have “very firm, very harsh” conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite Trump’s dismissal on Sunday of concerns about Putin’s authoritarian regime.
“What is your sense of why this president is going above and beyond, bending over backwards, if you will, to stay away from criticizing the Russian president and to almost give him an excuse?” NBC News’ Katy Tur asked Fischer. “Do you find that this is a dangerous path he is heading down?”
“I know that Putin is a thug and he runs a gas station,” Fischer said. “We have a very full understanding of who Vladimir Putin is, and he is not a friend of the United States.”
She said Trump must “establish relationships” with foreign heads of state but that he also must “recognize them for who they are.”
“And I believe that President Trump will recognize or does recognize right now who Putin is and he will develop that relationship and he will know how to confront him,” Fischer said.
“Very quickly, what makes you say that he does recognize who Putin is when he hasn’t said so publicly?” Tur asked.
“Well, I think when you’re at the beginning of an administration, you really don’t want to go out and start attacking people that you’re going to have to work with,” Fischer said.
She compared it to bipartisan compromise within the U.S. Senate.
“I think it’s important that we show that we can work together,” she said. “I am hopeful that President Trump will have very firm, very harsh, if need be, conversations with Putin to let him know that here in the United States we understand who he is, we understand what we view as his agenda in trying to re-establish some kind of empire for himself, and that we will not allow that to happen.”
Trump dismissed concerns about Putin’s authoritarian regime in an interview with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly on Sunday, saying that the United States is not “so innocent.”
“We’ve got a lot of killers,” Trump said. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
Watch the exchange below:
