Eric Bolling Praises Trump for Making Putin the ‘Beta Male’ at 2019 Summit

Newsmax host Eric Bolling panned President Joe Biden’s handling of Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and suggested it wouldn’t have happened on Donald Trump’s watch.

Bolling noted Tuesday that Vladimir Putin forcibly annexed Crime in 2014 while Barack Obama was president and is now again violating Ukrainian territory under Biden.

“There was four years under Trump where there was none of this aggression,” Bolling said.

The host then played a clip of Trump and Putin shaking hands at what appears to be the 2019 G20 summit in Osaka. Bolling pointed to Trump’s demeanor to claim that he was the “alpha male” in that moment. In the clip, Trump shakes hands with Putin and pulls the diminutive Russian president toward him.

“This one stuck out for me because this is a President Trump who is an alpha male when it comes to it. He grabs Putin and pulls him in,” said Bolling. “I’m not a body language expert, but I will tell you, man to man, when someone does that to me, this guy is trying to show dominance over me. And he clearly – Putin – was the beta male in that room at that moment.”

As president, Trump cast doubt on the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential campaign on his behalf. Detractors repeatedly criticized Trump for taking a seemingly soft rhetorical soft toward the Russian autocrat.

“Don’t meddle in the election, president,” Trump told Putin jokingly at the 2019 Osaka summit, as he wagged a finger at him. Putin laughed when Trump’s words were translated by an interpreter.

More famously, Trump showed arresting deference to Putin at a 2018 summit in Helsinki.

“They said they think it’s Russia,” Trump said of his intelligence officials at the time. “I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Watch above via Newsmax.