‘New York Times’ White House correspondent Peter Baker on “Washington Week” said Zelensky helped President Donald Trump discover that he can’t trust his “friend” Vladimir Putin.

ASHLEY PARKER, THE ATLANTIC, ‘WASHINGTON WEEK’ GUEST HOST: So, Peter, what has changed? Has Trump come around to Zelenskyy? Has he soured on Putin? Is it something we can’t even fathom yet? PETER BAKER, NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, it’s really fascinating. You know why Zelenskyy got under Trump’s skin at that thing a few months ago? Because he was telling him Putin is going to shovel a lot of B.S. your way, that you cannot trust Putin. And Trump took offense at that. He says, no, that’s just not true. In effect, what he’s saying is, I’ve been through so much with my friend, Vladimir Putin. We went through the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax together, you know, blah, blah, blah. And now what Trump has discovered is what Zelenskyy told him is basically right. You cannot assume that Trump — that Putin is your friend, you kind of assume that he wants a peace deal because he doesn’t. He’s made that very clear. Now, you know, it’s striking to hear Trump say what he said this week because of ten years of bromance between the two, right, which is still seemingly inexplicable to a lot of people. Why would Trump be so favorable toward Putin for so long? Has he come around to believe what everybody else already believed, which is that Putin is not his friend? ASHLEY PARKER: Which his in own intelligence services had been telling him since his first term for the better part of a decade. PETER BAKER: And his friends, like Lindsey Graham and other Republicans, would tell him, you know, Marco Rubio used to be a hawk, he would have — the old Senator Rubio would’ve told him that, I don’t know about Secretary Rubio. Now, does that mean that they’ll stay, you know, estranged? We’ve seen with Trump before. Of course, he has — you know, he goes in and out with people, right? He gets mad at people and then they’re back into his orbit. So, if they had a deal next week of some sort that Trump could tout, he would suddenly be friends again, probably with Putin. But it is interesting that he’s learned that Putin is not the guy he thought he was. And it is important to remember that Trump thought they were so close that he could snap his fingers and have a peace deal within 24 hours. He told everybody, not even after his inauguration, he said he could do it before his inauguration, and he has discovered otherwise.

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