President Donald Trump privately bragged to campaign donors last year that he made a bold threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face over the Ukraine war, according to new audio.
A series of audio tapes from fundraisers for then-candidate Trump in New York and Florida last year were obtained by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, authors of the new book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. The tapes were aired Tuesday night by CNN.
“With Putin, I said ‘If you go into Ukraine, I’m gonna bomb the s–-t out of Moscow,” Trump told his donors. “‘I’m telling you, I have no choice—the public.’ So he goes like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ He said, ‘No way.’ And I said, ‘Way.’”
Trump then claimed that Putin believed his threat “10 percent.”
The Trump campaign declined to comment to CNN on the tapes, its report added. The Daily Beast has reached out for comment.
The new tapes provide insight into private conversations with Putin that Trump has alluded to in the past but refused to elaborate on.
In 2022, Trump told Fox News that he had a “very strong conversation” with his Russian counterpart but said he “won’t go into the great details of the conversation because nobody has to know that.”
The president has repeatedly insisted that the Ukraine war would not have happened under his watch. Since Trump took office at the start of the year, however, the conflict has seen numerous escalations that have left hundreds dead.
Trump also vowed to end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day, but has so far been unsuccessful in brokering a peace deal. On Tuesday, he announced that the U.S. would send more weapons to Ukraine.
The announcement came as Trump has grown increasingly impatient with the lack of progress toward a resolution to the conflict.
“We also talked about, as you know, the war with Ukraine,” Trump told reporters last week about his call with Putin. “I’m not happy about that. I didn’t make any progress with him today at all.”
In another tape aired by CNN, Trump revealed that he issued a similar threat to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“I’m with President Xi of China. I said the same thing to him. I said, you know, ‘If you go into Taiwan, I’m gonna bomb the s–-t out of Beijing.’ He thought I was crazy. He said, ‘Beijing?! You’re gonna bomb-’ I said, ‘I have no choice. I got to bomb you. We’re gonna bomb Bei-’ and he didn’t believe me either.”
Trump claimed that Xi also believed him “10 percent.”
“Ten percent is all you need. In fact, five percent would have been okay, too. And we never had a problem. We would have never had a problem.”
Other tapes unveiled private comments that Trump made to donors about pro-Palestine student protesters.
“One thing I’d do is any student that protests, I would throw them out of the country,” he said, drawing applause. “Those people made a big mistake. Throw them out of the country, and I think that will stop it.”
The president has since made good on those promises, with the administration cracking down on international students who have protested the war in Gaza.
“If you get me elected, we will set that movement back 25 to 30 years,” he said.
In another tape, Trump touted how he got one billionaire donor to write him a bigger check.
“He wants to have lunch with me over a million dollars,” he said of the donor. “I said, ‘You’re worth five or six billion dollars, you’re talking about a million dollars, and I got to have lunch? I’m not having lunch. You got to make it 25 million.”
“And he said, ‘Oh, that sounds like a lot,’” Trump went on. “And he did it. He gave me 25 million dollars. It’s crazy.”
