Has the warmth gone from the Trump-Putin bromance?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

65% : During his time out of office, after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump again praised Putin for his audacity.
65% : Shortly after the ill-fated "special military operation" was launched in 2022, Trump declared at a fund raising event at Mar-a-Lago: "They say, 'Trump said Putin's smart.'
54% : After all, Trump craves respect even more than adulation - and there are two upstart global gangsters over on the "east side", Xi and Kim, who will be watching for any signs of weakness.
53% : Like it or not there will be a "compromise" over peace, but Trump is too proud and America too strong for that to be on easy terms for President Putin.
48% : No mafiosi wants to lose face before his initiation ceremony, which for Trump arrives on 20 January.
44% : At the Helsinki summit, in 2018, Trump went as far as to publicly state that he was more prepared to trust the word of this dictator than his own intelligence agencies.
38% : When Putin mischievously said he was supporting Kamala Harris in the election he may have been playful; but since election day Moscow has been muted in its remarks about Trump, beyond noting his past bravery during assassination attempts.Putin took his time to congratulate his counterpart.
37% : There's little chance that Trump would, either.
29% : Certainly when the two men did belatedly get to speak on a call, Trump seemed less of a pushover, and even to have been a little menacing, again like a mobster warning a rival off his territory.
21% : It seems obvious, actually, that Trump will not want his first big foreign initiative to be an abject humiliation in Ukraine; and he'll need Zelensky and the European allies to at least acquiesce in the deal, whatever it turns out to be.
20% : It would also be seen as a repeat of the debacle in Kabul, where the chaotic withdrawal of Allied forces by Joe Biden was pre-ordained by the surrender treaty Trump was conned into signing with the Taliban.
18% : "Subsequent to that, Trump said he could end the war in a day, something widely taken to mean he'd force President Zelensky to capitulate and let Putin keep his illegal territorial gains.
10% : Trump may be realising Putin is a rival, not a 'friend', writes Sean O'Grady - and we all know how The Donald treats his rivals...Donald Trump has a complicated relationship with Vladimir Putin, to say the least.
9% : Trump doesn't want to preside over a Russian victory in Ukraine in what would inevitably be perceived around the world as another defeat for America (and Trump).
7% : The Kremlin's clowning television proxies, so often sycophantic to Trump, have been more sceptical than they were when Trump got in in 2016.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.