‘Distrustful’ Trump Flouts Procedures to Call World Leaders

Donald Trump has reportedly spoken with world leaders like Vladimir Putin this week without the typical oversight of the U.S. State Department and government interpreters.

The reasoning for this, as sources explained to The Washington Post, is that Trump is “distrustful” of federal officials after a string of leaked transcripts emerged from calls he made with world leaders during his first White House term.

The Post reported its “standard procedure” for incoming presidents to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration, which the Trump transition team has so far bypassed. Officials familiar with conversations told Politico on Saturday that Trump’s team is expected to eventually sign an agreement with the agency, but they had not done so by the weekend’s end.

An insider told the Post that, for now, world leaders have just been calling Trump directly.

Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said in a statement that world leaders have reached out to Trump to congratulate him and to develop “stronger relationships” with the president-elect.

Cheung’s statement added that the incoming president represents “global peace and stability,” a point Trump’s campaign regularly emphasized by pointing to the relative stability in the Middle East and in Ukraine during his first term.

Trump and Putin reportedly conversed Thursday for the first time after Trump’s comfortable election win. Sources told the Post that Trump, speaking from Mar-a-Lago, encouraged the longtime Russian leader to “not to escalate the war in Ukraine” and “reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence” next door to him in Europe.

A key promise of Trump’s campaign was to bring an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, but he’s stopped short of detailing how he plans to accomplish that.

Among the others to ring Trump this week was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In that 25-minute call, reports said Trump’s billionaire super-supporter Elon Musk was also on the line.

Ukrainian officials told the Post they did not object to Trump calling Putin. They reportedly understood conversations would take place between the two men regarding the years-long war between Russia and Ukraine, which has left a staggering 500,000 troops killed or injured, U.S. officials revealed this summer.

There had been fears in Ukraine that a Trump presidency would spell the end of most U.S. military aid to the country. On his call this week, however, Axios reported that Ukrainian officials found Trump’s words “somewhat more reassuring” than expected.

Trump’s election win is yet to lead to an immediate slowing of fighting between Russia and Ukraine, however. A CNN report on Sunday revealed that Russia and North Korean troops had “amassed a large force of tens of thousands” to carry out an assault on Ukrainian positions in Russia’s Kursk region—an operation that’s expected to begin in the coming days.