Trump is a 'Russian asset,' Portuguese president says
U.S. President Donald Trump is "objectively, a Soviet or Russian asset," Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said in a speech on Aug. 27.
Speaking on a panel for university students, Rebelo de Sousa was discussing how Trump represented a new breed of world leader on a world stage with rapidly shifting power dynamics.
"With one peculiar and complex thing — the supreme leader of the world's greatest superpower is, objectively, a Soviet or Russian asset. He functions as an asset," he said in comments reported by CNN.
"I am saying that, objectively speaking, the new American leadership has strategically favored the Russian Federation."
Trump's second term in office has seen a dramatic shift in the U.S.'s stance towards Ukraine and Russia compared to that of his predecessor, President Joe Biden.
Despite a now months-long U.S.-led effort to end the war in Ukraine, Trump has yet to take any concrete steps to pressure Russia to stop fighting, while at various points, temporarily halting military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine, and repeatedly publicly berating the country's President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Most recently, after an overnight Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv that killed 23 people including four children, the White House equated the strike with Ukraine's defensive attacks against Russian infrastructure that supports its full-scale invasion.
Questions about Trump's possibly shady relationship with Russia and the country's security services have long swirled, even culminating in a special counsel investigation during his first term in office.
Though that investigation found evidence of "extensive criminal activity" by Trump, his associates, and some of his family members, it found no evidence that he was working for, or had ever been recruited by, Russia's security services.
Yet the accusations have continued, and Rebelo de Sousa is not the first European official to accuse Trump of being a Russian asset — in March, British lawmaker Graham Stuart raised the possibility that Trump had been groomed by the Kremlin’s security services over a period of decades.
