Putin: In-Person Trump Not the Same as TV Trump

Vladimir Putin came away from his two-hour-plus meeting with President Trump Friday in Hamburg, Germany, with some definite impressions—notably, that the Trump we see on TV may not bear much similarity to the Trump behind the scenes, the Hill reports. "Trump on television very much differs from the man in reality," the Russian president said at a Saturday presser, per a translation offered on Twitter by Anton Troianovski of the Wall Street Journal. In what Newsweek calls a "moderate" appraisal of his US counterpart, Putin went on to say that Trump "is very concrete, he fully perceives [the person he's speaking with], and he analyzes and answers questions or new elements that come up in the course of the discussion quickly enough."

Putin added he hoped that their dialogue may be a sign of good things to come. "If we can build our new relationship in the spirit of our first conversation, then we will have every reason to expect that we will at least in part be able to restore the level of cooperation that we need," he noted. What else the Russian leader thinks came out of the meeting: Trump's acceptance of Putin's assertions that Russia didn't interfere with the US election. "He asked many questions on the subject, I tried to answer them all," Putin said, per the AP. "It seemed to me that he was satisfied with the answers [and] that he [took] note of that and agreed," he added, though he said people should ask Trump himself. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, scoffed at Putin's depiction, noting to CNN: "President Trump still knows that they meddled. President Putin knows that they meddled, but he is never going to admit to it." (More Vladimir Putin stories.)