(Headline USA) Former President Donald Trump mentioned the recent death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death in an Arctic penal colony in a searing condemnation of leftist lawfare attacks that have likewise sought to neutralize the leading opposition candidate of the party in power.
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” he wrote.
“It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction,” he continued. “Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”
Trump’s post came just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin lovingly offered a Valentine’s Day endorsement to incumbent President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, describing him as “more experienced, more predictable” compared with Trump, who kept the ex-KGB official on edge during his presidency.
During a 2022 summit at the University of Chicago, former President Barack Obama, whom many believe to be quietly running the show given Biden’s clear cognitive decline, previously expressed his admiration for Putin’s ability to maintain an “absolute control of information” in his country.
Thus far, the legal attacks on Trump have only helped him politically, although they are likely to take a major toll on his finances if the appeals fail and are expected to keep him bogged down in courts throughout much of the campaign season.
New York judge Arthur Engoron on Friday ordered Trump to pay $355 million in a civil trial after predetermining his guilt and arbitrarily deciding the value of Trump’s property holdings himself.
Trump has also been criminally charged in four separate investigations, the first of which is scheduled to go to trial next month. Legal experts such as Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley have pointed out the flimsiness of all four cases, while many have noted the legal double standard compared with Democrats having given themselves free passes in parallel situations.
Trump’s post drew immediate denunciation from his rivals, including Nikki Haley, his last remaining challenger in the Republican nominating contest, who has been stepping up her criticism of the former president heading into Saturday’s South Carolina primary.
“Donald Trump could have condemned Vladimir Putin for being a murderous thug,” she wrote. “Trump could have praised Navalny’s courage.” Instead, “he stole a page from liberals’ playbook, denouncing America and comparing our country to Russia.”
On Monday morning in Sumter, she further accused Trump of “siding with a thug” in Putin, whom she called “a dictator who killed his political opponents.”
Biden’s campaign tweeted that after days of silence, Trump finally responded by comparing Navalny to himself in a “deranged social media post.”
As president, Trump drew outrage from the Left when he openly questioned his own intelligence agencies’ finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election to help him win.
His doubts, however, were largely validated after evidence proved that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had largely fabricated the claims pushed by the leftist media. New evidence recently has revealed, however, that the origin of the false smear campaign may in fact have been Obama CIA Director John Brennan.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, has accused Putin of killing her husband in a remote prison and refusing to turn over his body as part of a cover-up.
Russian authorities have said Navalny’s cause of death Friday is still unknown and is the subject of a new investigation. Its findings are likely to be met with deep skepticism.
Prison officials allegedly told Navalny’s mother when she arrived at the penal colony Saturday that her son had perished from “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, tweeted.
Navalny had been imprisoned since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
