Moscow is planning to wrap Donald Trump around its finger, with state propagandists spilling the details even before the president-elect’s second administration begins.
Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT, believes that personal meetings between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will bring about positive outcomes for the foreign nation, so long as they’re able to meet face-to-face, according to The Daily Beast.
During an interview on the program The Right to Know, Simonyan—a Kremlin insider—claimed that a second Trump presidency would see multiple sanctions on Russia lifted, as well as RT’s return to U.S. cable sets.
Simonyan also advocated for Russia to follow in the footsteps of China, supporting a totalitarian level of government censorship that would allow the country to control digital platforms of information, including Google and YouTube.
The propagandist also shrugged off Trump’s promises to quickly end the war in Ukraine, while likening the intelligence of U.S. politicians to that of Soviet children. During a spontaneous press conference on Monday, Trump said that he believed the Ukraine-Russia conflict could be more difficult to solve than the Israel-Palestine war in the Middle East and suggested that he might hobble Ukraine’s weapons capabilities by reversing the country’s long-range strike authorization that allows Ukraine to use the Army Tactical Missile System against Russian positions.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he would be open to temporarily ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia if it meant entering the country into NATO, the strategic Western military and trade alliance. That is, however, unlikely to get very far with Russian negotiators.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Cabinet picks are “thrilling” Russian mouthpieces, according to the Beast, which reported that Simonyan views some of Trump’s most unqualified choices—such as DOGE co-chair nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard—as familiar faces on the Russian network.
“I would endorse most of what [Vivek] Ramaswamy says,” Simonyan said. “These people who are being announced as potential members of his team certainly bring us lots of joy.
“Most of these people are constant guests of RT’s broadcasts,” she continued. “Until RT was shut down, they were our constant guests. For example, Tulsi Gabbard, who keeps being hounded about this right now, ‘Ah, you love RT, you constantly shared their clips, you constantly went there.’ Well, she did come to us all the time, it’s true. It’s not something you can conceal—and she is not the only one.”