Pence defends Trump comments on Putin: ‘inarguable’

Mr Trump, who has often praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, made the comments in an interview with former CNN broadcaster Larry King, whose podcast was aired on Thursday night on the RT network, a 24-hour news channel that broadcasts in both English and Russian.

Donald Trump said Thursday he hopes Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein stay out of the presidential debates.

Graham was responding to Trump’s remarks at a forum Wednesday night, wherein he told NBC News’s Matt Lauer that Putin was a stronger leader than President Barack Obama.

Donald Trump’s bromance with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin seems unending. Previously in this campaign cycle, Trump has stumbled over questions about Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory Crimea and called for Russians to find missing emails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state.

Trump’s interview surfaced as he and Clinton continue to clash over foreign policy in the run-up to the November 8 election.

For the most part they refrained, though Clinton said Trump had refused to take responsibility for his initial support for the Iraq War.

The real estate magnate was the most prominent early proponent of a theory that Obama, the nation’s first black president, was not born in the United States and therefore, under the US Constitution, ineligible to be commander in chief.

Trump also outlined proposals for an active army of around 540,000 troops, an air force of at least 1,200 fighter aircraft, a 36-battalion marine corps and a navy of 350 surface ships and submarines – though he provided no details on how he would persuade Congress to pay for it all. “That’s how well we did”, Mr Trump said, apparently drawing strength from the ructions he has sowed in the government of America’s neighbour. “If we would have taken the oil, we wouldn’t have ISIS”, Trump said, before adding that he would not discuss his plans on national television because the enemy could be listening.

Reiterating a line he’s used on the campaign trail, Kaine compared Trump’s encouraging of Russian hackers to the 1970s’ Watergate scandal, pointing out that former President Richard Nixon was impeached for “encouraging crooks to commit espionage against the DNC in a presidential year to get an edge”.

It’s pretty freaky when a presidential nominee has nicer things to say about the controversial President of Russian Federation than the President of the United States! “I think what he’s talking about is ensuring that we have strong leadership from the commander-in-chief on down who listen to our generals”. When pressed on how he would go about eliminating the Islamic fundamentalist group, Trump merely shrugged away from the details, instead recounting his version of how the organization became so powerful. And Trump’s excited a lot of people and he scares a lot of others who’ll be asking ‘is this the guy I want protecting me and my family? “I’ll just leave it at that”, he said.

“We have to vet very carefully, but the answer is it would be a very special circumstance”, he said.