Trevor Reed, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who was formerly detained in Russia on allegations widely decried as politically motivated and was released to the U.S. in a 2022 prisoner swap, is calling out former President Donald Trump.
In surprisingly emphatic terms, Trump claimed in a recent rant on his knock-off social media site Truth Social that reporter Evan Gershkovich — a U.S. journalist currently detained in Russia — would be returned to the U.S. right away if Trump regains power.
“As a former wrongful detainee in Russia, I would just like to remind everyone that President Trump had the ability to get myself and Paul Whelan out of Russia for years and chose not to. I would be skeptical of any claims about getting Evan Gershkovich back in a day,” Reed wrote on social media.
Trump also provoked questions with his emphatic insistence that Gershkovich would be returned about whether there’d been some kind of deal struck with Russian authorities. The worries even showed up in some of the top comments on Reed’s post on X, formerly Twitter. “I wouldn’t be skeptical. I’d be asking what russia gets in return,” someone replied, which Reed considered a “valid point.”
Bob Cesca, a relatively established liberal political commentator, helped spread similar questions. “The political press needs to ask Trump and his surrogates whether he cut a deal with Putin to keep Gershkovich in captivity until after the election. There’s *Republican* precedent for deals like this, by the way,” he posited on X.
Trump, meanwhile, continues to peddle startlingly positive views of the Russian leader. “When you see Putin, and you see all of these people — they’re at the top of their game,” Trump said at a campaign rally held this week in New York City… the location of which prompted its own skepticism and derision, considering Trump lost the city by a large margin in the 2020 election.
