Trump Doubles Down on Making Navalny’s Death About Him

Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

Donald Trump is not big on speaking out against Russian president Vladimir Putin or empathizing with other human beings. So it was awful, yet unsurprising, when all Trump had to say about Russian dissident Alexey Navalny dying in an Arctic penal colony last week was that his death reminded him a lot of his own (imagined) political persecution. On Monday he wrote this on Truth Social:

This did not go over well. The post generated many headlines about Trump’s self-centeredness. Critics called his remarks “grotesque” and “anti-American crap.” Political rivals pounced, with Nikki Haley calling Trump “weak in the knees” on Putin and Joe Biden asking, “Why does Trump always blame America?”

Still, this is the kind of offhand narcissism that would probably be forgotten in a few weeks, buried under all the other appalling and nonsensical things Trump says every single day.

That is, until Trump decided to repeat the sentiment in a more noticeable venue.

In a town-hall-style Fox interview on Tuesday night, Laura Ingraham gave Trump a chance to clean up his remarks. “People around the world are expressing outrage over the death of Alexey Navalny in a horrific Russian prison,” she began, per MeidasTouch. But before she could even get the whole question out, Trump interjected, “It’s happening here.”

Ingraham continued, inviting Trump to respond to accusations that he’s “pro-Putin” and doesn’t “care about human rights or freedom.” He initially praised Navalny, saying it’s “a very sad situation, and he’s very brave — he was a very brave guy because he went back,” referring to Navalny returning to Russia after he was poisoned in 2020, allegedly in a Kremlin-backed assassination attempt.

Then Trump added: “He could have stayed away, and frankly, probably would have been a lot better off staying away and talking from outside of the country as opposed to having to go back in because people thought that could happen and it did happen.”

As the Biden campaign quickly pointed out, this made it sound like Trump was blaming Navalny for his own death, rather than Putin.

And Trump kept going. Later, he brought up the Navalny comparison on his own when asked about being fined more than $355 million by Justice Arthur Engoron for repeatedly engaging in fraud. “It’s a form of Navalny. It’s a form of communism or fascism,” Trump said.

So was Navalny “a very brave guy” for devoting his life to fighting corruption and standing up to Putin’s autocratic regime? Sure, I guess. But the really important thing to remember is that no one is a bigger political martyr than Donald J. Trump.