After remaining mum for days on the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, last Monday, Donald Trump finally brought it up by comparing Navalny’s death to his own legal problems, NBC News reported.
Russian prison authorities reported that Navalny died from “sudden death syndrome” in a penal colony in a remote village in the Arctic on February 16.
His death prompted swift condemnation from world leaders and US officials who accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of having Navalny killed.
During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” the following Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley blasted Donald Trump over his silence on Navalny’s death, telling anchor Jonathan Karl that Trump’s refusal to comment either meant that the former president thought it was “cool” that Putin had a political opponent killed or didn’t think it was “that big of a deal.”
Haley said either reason for Trump’s silence was “concerning” and showed how he felt about Putin.
The following day, Trump finally addressed Navalny’s death, not to condemn the Kremlin but to complain about “what is happening in our Country.”
In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump compared Navalny’s circumstances with his own and claimed that “Radical Left” judges, prosecutors, and politicians were leading the country “down a path of destruction” through “Rigged Elections” and court decisions.
Haley blasted Trump’s response, saying in a post on X that Trump could have condemned Putin as “a murderous thug” or praised Alexei Navalny’s courage. Instead, Haley suggested that Trump behaved like a liberal by comparing the United States to Russia and “denouncing America.”
Navalny survived several poisoning attempts before he was imprisoned, including in 2020 when he was poisoned with a nerve agent while on a trip to Russia.
At the time, then-President Trump called the poisoning incident “terrible” and “tragic” but said there was no proof that the Kremlin was behind it. When asked by reporters two weeks later if the US had any proof that Putin or the Kremlin was behind the poisoning, Trump refused to answer, saying he would discuss it “another time.”
