Fox presenter reacts with fury after Geraldo Rivera suggests Putin may have been ‘playing’ Trump

Fox News host Jeannine Pirro exploded at her co-host Geraldo Rivera after he suggested Russian president Vladimir Putin was “playing Trump”.

The Five panelists were discussing the invasion of Ukraine on Tuesday night when Pirro launched into a diatribe about United States president Joe Biden.

“What we are seeing right now is a wuss. We’ve got a bully in the yard ... and everybody’s back at the fence,” she said.

Pirro claimed the US, Canada and Mexico had enough oil to “be our own superpowers”, but that the Biden administration was holding them back with “all this hashtag, blame Putin, TikTok nonsense”.

“He is destroying the West,” she said.

Rivera then asks: “How do you know that Putin wasn’t playing Trump?”

The comment sparked a furious response from Pirro, who claimed the former president had “everybody against the wall”.

“I don’t give a damn what Putin thinks, I only care what Putin did, and he was a wuss when Trump was president, and that’s the end of it.”

Mr Trump faced persistent scrutiny over his relationship with Mr Putin during his four years in office as he appeared to repeatedly take a reverential – or even submissive – attitude towards the Russian leader.

At a summit in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018 Mr Trump even publicly sided with his Russian counterpart over his own intelligence services on the issue of whether Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election. The Republican senator John McCain called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in recent memory”.

He lobbied for Russia to be allowed to rejoin the G7 after it was thrown out for annexing the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014, and repeated Kremlin talking points suggesting Ukraine, not Russia, had been interfering in the 2016 election.

The Mueller Report into links between the Trump campaign and Russia found that the Republican’s team welcomed help from Moscow and that Mr Trump may have tried to obstruct justice in an attempt to shut down the investigation up to 11 times – although Robert Mueller said there was not enough evidence to pinpoint a conspiracy.

In 2019 Mr Trump was impeached after it emerged he had tried to withhold congressionally-approved military aid for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia – as well as a White House visit by Volodymyr Zelensky – in return for political dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

It was reported that Mr Trump was planning to pull the US out of Nato should he have won a second term in office, something he has denied.

Last month he described the escalation of the Ukraine crisis as a “genius” move by Mr Putin.