Trump on Putin: ‘If He Wants to Fight ISIS, Let Him Fight ISIS’
The US Republican presidential hopeful has praised President Putin’s leadership, giving him the highest grade, unlike his own country’s leader; Trump also criticized US’ Syria policy, bashing Washington for not even knowing whom it is backing. It may even be that President Assad is a better leader than those whom the US is supposed to be backing.
“I will tell you that I think in terms of [President Putin’s] leadership, he is getting an “A” and our president is not doing so well. They did not look good together,” Donald Trump said in his interview with “The O’Reilly Factor” show on Fox News, commenting on the meeting between the two leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
The republican presidential hopeful also touched upon Vladimir Putin’s policy in Syria, reiterating “if he wants to fight the Islamic State (also known as ISIL and ISIS), let him fight ISIS.”
“We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, wounded warriors all over,” he raged. “And Putin is now taking over what we started. And he is going into Syria and he frankly wants to fight ISIS and I think that is a wonderful thing!”
“Personally, I’ve been looking at different players and I’ve watching Assad and saying may be he is better than the kind of people we are supposed to be backing, because we don’t even know who we are backing, we have no idea.”
When asked by the host to name the downside of President’s Putin fighting ISIS, he said that there is very little.
“Putin wants to keep ISIS out of Russia and therefore he’s become very active with respect to ISIS and I think that’s to our benefit,” Trump said.
“You are going to tell me the downside is that we are losing control of the Middle East,” Trump concluded.
“Fine, we can be in Syria. Do you want to run Syria? Do you want to own Syria? I want to rebuild our country,’ Trump nevertheless replied.
And no matter how persistent Bill O’Reilly was, Trump continued:
“You have huge oil reserves, you have tremendous wealth in the Middle East that people don’t even know about. By the way, forget about Putin, you have Iran, [which] is going to take over Iraq, I called that many years ago. On your show I said that we should have never got into Iraq, which I should be given a little credit for vision, because I was the only one running who said that.”
“We should have never [done it] because we destabilized the Middle East.”
“Iran is going to take over Iraq, including their vast oil reserves and the leftovers are taken over by ISIS. So, what have we done with our incompetent leadership?” he asked.
“We have given the Middle East primarily to Putin and Iran and they will run it for the foreseeable future,” O’Reilly grimly concluded.