Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday likened his $355 million fine for fraudulently inflating the value of his properties to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.
“It is a form of Navalny,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall in South Carolina, when asked how he was planning on paying the judgment in his civil fraud case. “It is a form of communism or fascism.”
The former president, who faces 91 criminal charges across multiple cases, continued to baselessly suggest he was being politically targeted in the same way the outspoken Kremlin critic was.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, did not condemn Russia or President Vladimir Putin for Navalny’s death – standing in stark contrast to the swift and forceful reactions from Western leaders, including President Joe Biden, who blamed Putin in a speech from the White House hours after reports of Navalny’s death.
In Trump’s most extensive comments yet about Navalny, the former president said Tuesday: “Navalny, he was a very sad situation, and he’s very brave. He was a very brave guy because he went back, he could’ve stayed away and frankly probably would’ve been a lot better off staying away and talking from outside of the country as opposed to having to go back in.”
“And it’s a horrible thing. But it’s happening in our country too. We are turning into a communist country in many ways. And if you look at it, I’m the leading candidate, I got indicted … I got indicted four times, I have eight or nine trials … all because of the facts that I’m in politics,” Trump said.
The jailed Russian opposition figure died at the age of 47, the Russian prison service said last week. He had returned to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated…
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