It is unclear when Trump allegedly warned the two leaders.
President Donald Trump allegedly told a group of campaign donors at a fundraising event last year that he had separately warned the Russian and Chinese leaders that he would bomb their capitals if they invaded their neighbors, according to a leaked audio.
The audio, published by CNN on July 8, allegedly captures Trump’s remarks at a private fundraiser during the 2024 presidential election recounting conversations he had with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese regime leader Xi Jinping.
“With Putin, I said, ‘If you go into Ukraine, I’m going to bomb the [expletive] out of Moscow. I’m telling you I have no choice,’” Trump could be heard saying, according to the audio. “And then [Putin] goes, like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ But he believed me 10 percent.”
According to the audio, Trump later added that he had conveyed a similar warning to Xi over a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a self-governing island that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims as a part of its territory.
“Then I’m with President Xi of China,” Trump said, per the audio. “I said the same thing to them. I said, you know, ‘If you go into Taiwan, I’m gonna bomb the [expletive] out of Beijing.’
“He thought I was crazy. He said, ‘Beijing!? You’re going to bomb [Beijing]?’
“I said, ‘I have no choice. I got to bomb you.’ And [Xi] didn’t believe me either. He said 10 percent. And 10 percent is all you need. In fact, 5 percent would have been okay, too.”
Trump also commented about his relationship with Xi, saying, according to the audio: “We never had a problem. We would have never had a problem.”
The audio was obtained by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, who described the exchange in their book “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” which was released earlier this week.
Trump’s alleged comments were part of several audio recordings captured during fundraising events in New York and Florida in 2024, according to CNN.
It is unclear when Trump allegedly warned Putin and Xi.
The Epoch Times could not independently verify the authenticity of the audio recordings.
In response to an email inquiry on Thursday, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told The Epoch Times that “as President Trump has said time and again, Russia never dared invade Ukraine when he was in office.”
“It happened only when [Joe] Biden was in office. Thanks to this President’s leadership, America is once again the leader of the free world, and peace through strength is restored,” Kelly said.
“President Trump won on an America First agenda, and he is working hard to implement the mandate the American people gave him.”
The Epoch Times contacted the Chinese Embassy in Washington for comment, but didn’t receive a response by publication time.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he was not authorized to comment when asked about Trump’s alleged remarks, according to Russian state news agency TASS.
“Whether this is fake or not, we don’t know either,” Peskov said, according to the outlet. “There are a lot of fakes now. Often there are many more fakes than truthful information. And we always proceed from this when analyzing this or that news.”
Trump has repeatedly said that the Russia–Ukraine war, which began in February 2022, would not have occurred had he been president at the time.
U.S. diplomatic efforts to help end the war have slowed. Speaking during a Cabinet meeting on July 8, Trump expressed frustration over Putin’s actions in the negotiations.
“We get a lot of [expletive] thrown at us by Putin, [if] you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 31, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that a potential Chinese invasion against Taiwan could be “imminent,” even though “nobody knows what China will ultimately do.”
“It’s public that Xi has ordered his military to be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027,” Hegseth said at the time. “Any attempt by Communist China to conquer Taiwan by force would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world.”
In June, in a written testimony for a congressional hearing, Hegseth characterized the Chinese regime as a “pacing threat.”
“Beijing is preparing for war in the Indo-Pacific as part of its broader strategy to dominate that region and then the world,” Hegesth said at the hearing.
“Were it to succeed, it would be able to attempt to derail American reindustrialization and then strangle the U.S. economy. This cannot happen and my Department will not let it happen.”
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