Donald Trump has nothing but love for Vladimir Putin

“When people call you brilliant, it’s always good”, Trump said Friday.

Brezinski moved on to a question about how U.S.-Russia relations would fare under a Trump presidency.

When Scarborough pushed again, arguing that Putin “kills journalist that don’t agree with him”, Trump didn’t budge.

“He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country”, Trump said when asked by “Morning Joe” Republican host Joe Scarborough about Putin’s alleged killing of journalists and political opponents.

“At least he’s a leader unlike what we have in this country”, Trump said.

“I suppose [Putin] sympathises with Trump without knowing him well in person but he is following him closely, what he does and says, just because he is not a kind of usual Western politician”, Alexander Baunov, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, told the Associated Press news agency.

Donald Trump hasn’t gotten a lot of big name endorsements, so in that sense it’s not a huge surprise that he’d embrace a thumbs up from someone pretty well-known.

Censoring the Internet, killing innocent families of terrorists, supporting Syria’s bloody dictator-the two men have a lot of positions in common. “And uh, that’s the way it is…”

“I’m confused”, the MSNBC host said.

Finally, when asked whether he would condemn Putin’s alleged brutal tactics, Trump responded: “Sure, absolutely”.

“We find it easy to work with both (Syrian President Bashar) al-Assad and the American side”, Putin said in the trailer of an upcoming television documentary released Saturday. That was months ago.

Further, Trump said, the United States needs to rebuild its military, but “that doesn’t mean we have to use it”.

While Republican presidential candidates have talked tough in response to Putin on the campaign trail, often criticizing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her “reset” with Russian Federation shortly after President Barack Obama entered office in 2009.

Donations made through the site are rerouted to Kasich for America; a note at the bottom of the site tells supporters “by signing up, you are waiving all constitutional rights, civil liberties, notions of privacy and subjecting yourself to a steady stream of hugely outrageous comments”.

When I first saw tweets pop up on this early this morning, I hoped Trump was being misquoted. Romney’s aide had this to say: “Putin praises him so he loves Putin”.

“Putin sincerely believes that Russia is surrounded by enemies and the job of a president is to be scary enough to scare them off”, Gessen said, adding that Putin embodies a “long Russian tradition” of viewing the outside world as a collection of antagonists.