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Mr. President, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. We got a readout of your call with Vladimir Putin, and it was a fairly optimistic take. Vladimir Putin agreed to a ceasefire immediately on energy and infrastructure, but not to a 30-day ceasefire. Tell us what happened. Well, you have a situation. We have a lot of guns pointing at each other foolishly, because it would have never happened if I were president. That was not a war that was supposed to happen. And it did happen. So that's where we are. And right now, you have a lot of guns pointing at each other. And a ceasefire without going a little bit further would have been tough. Russia has the advantage, as you know. They have encircled about 2,500 soldiers. They're nicely encircled, and that's not good. And we want to get it over with. Look, we're doing this. There are no Americans involved. There could be if you end up in World War III over this, which is so ridiculous. But strange things happen. And I think we had a great call, lasted almost two hours, talked about a lot of things toward getting it to peace. And we talked about other things also. Was there non-negotiables mentioned by Putin? It was reported that I think the Kremlin media actually stated that he demanded an immediate cessation of aid to Ukraine in order to get to this multi-step deal. No, we didn't talk about aid, actually. We didn't talk about aid at all. We talked about a lot of things, but aid was never discussed. In the readout, it also stated that both sides want to get to an improved bilateral relationship, the United States and Russia. That's true. How can we trust that Vladimir Putin actually wants that, in that he's not also being influenced at the same time by his close friend, President Xi of China? Well, look, we have our own discussions with President Xi of China, and he wants to get along also. And he's looking to get along, and we're looking to get along with him. And we will. We have a problem with trade, where we have a very big imbalance with China. With Russia, we don't have that much trade, and they'd like to, and we'd like to also. They have some very valuable things for us, including very big forms of rare earth. They have a lot of earth. You know, they have a big chunk of real estate, the biggest, actually the biggest in the world for a country by far. And on that, they have things that we could use, frankly, and that other people could use. I think that President Xi would like to get along, and I think Russia wants to get along with the United States. I also think we're a much different country than we were just a few months ago. We're a country that's now respected. We were not respected. We were being laughed at. We had incompetent leadership. This was a war, as an example, that would have never happened if I were president. Is part of your desire to forge this new relationship with Russia also impacted by Russia's closer relationship since you left office in 2021 with China? Because I think you talked about before the desire to box out China from that part of the world and have a closer relationship with Russia. So as a student of history, which I am, and I've watched it all, the first thing you learn is you don't want Russia and China to get together. With that being said, no, it's not a big part of it, but maybe that'll happen, or maybe it won't. Obama really forced them together through energy and bad energy policies, and when he did so many different things, he forced a marriage which would never have taken place. It was not a natural. And for one reason, Russia has tremendous land, a lot of land, and China doesn't have enough land. Russia has a much smaller population than China, and it was always a natural enemy situation. They're probably friendly now, but we're going to be friendly with both. I think we're going to be friendly with both. China needs us in terms of trade very badly, but we have to straighten out the deficit. We have now more than a trillion-dollar deficit with China. It's not even believable, and we're going to be doing something about that. But with Russia, they would like to have some of our economic power. The criticism that you've heard since really 2015 is that you have more in common with Vladimir Putin than you do with globalist leaders, maybe some NATO leaders, and in this case with Zelensky. You're both nationalists. Zelensky is more of a globalist. How do you respond to that criticism? Well, I am a nationalist, but I'm a nationalist for the United States, not for anybody else. And it's interesting, because there's nobody been tougher on Russia than me. I'm the one that pointed out Nord Stream 2, and I stopped it. Nord Stream is the biggest pipeline, I guess, in the world, taking care of all of Europe. And it was being built from before I got there, and somehow they were on the way, and I stopped it. It was just stone-cold dead. I stopped it, and it's tracks. That's not somebody that's being particularly – this is the biggest project they ever had. I had it stopped. When Biden got in, he immediately approved it, like immediately. One of the first things he did in office was he approved Nord Stream 2. Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream until I was president. I said, "What are you doing? You mean you're building a pipeline to Germany and various places in Europe. You're paying them billions of dollars a month, and then we're paying a lot of money to fight them. This is not going to work out well." And it stopped. And then Biden approved it, which was a really stupid thing to do, but he did it. And Putin actually said to me, "If you're my friend, I'd hate to see you as my enemy." He said that very strongly. But I had – with all of that, I had a very good relationship with Putin, I had a very good relationship with President Xi, a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, lots of good relationships. And that's a positive thing, that's not a negative thing. But at the same time, I'm about our country.

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