According to the Washington Post, headlining on May 28th “Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour”: “ For example, at one event, he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan, surprising some of the donors.”
This passage was buried a third of the way down a 2,000-word news-report, in that article documenting Trump’s many promises to the billionaires and centi-millionaires, such as cutting their taxes, and cutting the federal regulations that they dislike and want to be eliminated, reduced, and/or not effectively enforced. So: it presents Trump as being even more of a libertarian than has generally been publicly known.
The newspaper’s main sources seem to have been some of the attendees (none of whom were personally identified), presumably ones who themselves were shocked at the boldness, even the apparent extremism, of his libertarianism.
Regarding specifically Trump’s allegedly having said that The Kremlin ought to have been “bombed” by America when Russia invaded Ukraine, this is a policy-position which he has never publicly expressed before.
The article also indicates — this time from former Trump donors and former Trump campaign aides, some of whom did allow their names to be published — that Trump’s current campaigning is significantly more libertarian (or, as Europeans might call it, “neoliberal”) than he was during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, when he was far less blatantly focusing his fundraising pitches to mega-donors on the financial benefits to themselves if he becomes elected. For example: “‘He didn’t want to make fundraising calls,’ said Sam Nunberg, a former aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign. On the 2020 campaign, he would reluctantly participate in fundraisers, advisers said, seeing them as an unpleasant necessity.” But this time around, he’s showing no such qualms.
As regards his statement that if he had been President on 24 February 2022, he’d have “bombed” The Kremlin then, this is an international issue; and, so, it is outside of the traditional realm of libertarian-versus-socialistic policies, all of which concern only domestic (not any international) matters, and is instead extremist on the neoconservative (or U.S.-imperialist) side; he was saying that Joe Biden isn’t sufficiently neoconservative. This goes back to, for example, the Republican U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy, for whom there was no way that the U.S. Government could even conceivably be too much against Russia (back when it was communist; of course, he never knew post-communist Russia). Trump here is saying that regardless of the absence of the communist-versus capitalist issue in U.S.-Russia relations, America has a right to invade Russia if Russia invades a country that (since February 2014) is part of the U.S. empire.
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