Former President Donald Trump has faced ridicule after explaining to Elon Musk that he tried to persuade Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine.
During the Republican presidential nominee’s rambling, two-hour conversation Monday with the owner of X, formerly Twitter, Trump recounted an attempt to project strength to the leader of Russia, who rolled tanks into neighboring Ukraine about a year after Trump left the White House.
By Trump’s reckoning, Ukraine was “the apple of his [Putin’s] eye.”
“I said: ‘Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir. You do it, it’s going to be a bad day. You cannot do it,’” Trump recalled during his chat with Musk on X. “I told him things that, what I’d do, and he said, ‘No way,’ and I said, ‘Way!’”
The style of Trump’s speech was soon mocked by others on X.
“Trump reveals he talks to Vladimir Putin like a teenage girl,” said one user.
And the moment was picked up by MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday. The show played clips from the films “Wayne’s World” and “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in which the main characters of both movies exchange a “no way” and “way.”
Host Joe Scarborough derided Trump’s attempt at international diplomacy with a sarcastic comment about an imagined conversation between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Russian Communist Party leader Joseph Stalin at the end of World War II.
“We could have shown the clip of FDR talking to Stalin at Yalta,” Scarborough said, referring to the conference held in February 1945. “When Stalin said he was going into Eastern Europe, it was actually FDR that said, ‘No way,’ and then Stalin said, ‘Way.’ And there you go. The rest is history.”