A portrait of President Donald Trump that special envoy Steve Witkoff hand-delivered to White House from Vladimir Putin was subjected to a brutal round of criticism from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who mocked the administration official as an example of a “tough guy genius.”
Maddow delivered the strong rebuke Tuesday during her show’s opening monologue as she also ripped into Witkoff for reportedly being inside the Kremlin as high-level administration officials traded top secret war plans on a Signal group chat. She began her takedown by first addressing Witkoff directly.
“Steve, did you keep your phone with you while you were in Russia? Did you keep your phone with you while you were in the Kremlin? Was your phone turned on?” she asked. “What could possibly go wrong?”
An exasperated Maddow then laid into Witkoff for the “heartwarming tale” he told after that same trip to Moscow where the Russian president gave him a painting of Trump “which Putin had had made for Trump personally,” according to the MSNBC host.
“And Steve Witkoff hand carried that painting from Russia back to the United States and brought it to the White House and gave it to Donald Trump,” Maddow told viewers. “Did anybody check that painting? Anybody like, give it a close, going over?”
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She added that the White House envoy went onto praise Putin after the trip, telling right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson that he thought the Russian president was not a “bad guy.”
“This is our negotiator,” Maddow said. “This is the quality of tough guy genius the United States is bringing to the table for these supposedly tough guy negotiations with the Russians to end the war in Ukraine.”
“How's that going?” Maddow added sarcastically as she slammed Trump and his administration for bending to Russia without getting anything in exchange.
But, the host added, "Trump did get a painting!"
"We are not dealing with the sharpest tools in the shed here, at any level. We in fact appear to be dealing with very profoundly dull tools, but it's our national security that they're destroying, not theirs," Maddow concluded.
Watch the clip below or at this link.