President Donald Trump teased the possibility of reaching an economic deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral talks in Alaska.
The U.S. president spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One on his Friday morning flight across the country to the summit, and he was asked what would be the difference between his face-to-face meeting with Putin and their frequent phone calls – including up to seven conversations they had in the years between his two terms in the White House.
"Look, he's a smart guy," the president said. "He's been doing it for a long time, but so have I, been doing it for a long time, and here we are – we're president. That was much more difficult than what I'm doing today, believe me. So we get along. It's a good respect level on both sides, and I think, you know, something's going to come of it. I notice he's bringing a lot of business people from Russia, and that's good. I like that because they want to do business, but they're not doing business until we get the war settled."
Reporters asked the president whether he would discuss business dealings with Putin, despite extensive sanctions that have severely limited trade with Russia since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and he said that was possible.
"We have the hottest country on earth, we have the hottest economy on earth," Trump said. "We have the hottest company, country. We just set a new stock market record again. We have hundreds of billions of dollars flowing in from tariffs. We're the hottest. We were a dead country, dead like doornails, a dead country. One year ago we were dead as a doornail, and now we have the hottest country, and he wants a piece of that because his country is not hot economically. In fact, it's the opposite, and China is not doing well economically, but we're all – look, I want everybody to do well. The war is going to stop and the killing has got to stop."