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00:00Speaking of Fraser Jackson, our correspondent in Washington, Fraser, good evening to you.
00:02Trump's comments about Zelensky being a dictator have consumed headlines around the world for the
00:08last day or so. How has Trump's rhetoric around who's to blame for the war in Ukraine shifted
00:13over the past week? Well Donald Trump, ever since the campaign trail, has been saying that he could
00:22end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. But there has been a noticeable shift within the last week
00:28in Donald Trump's attitude towards Zelensky and the war itself. Just a week ago, less than a week
00:33ago, last Friday, I was in the Oval Office with Donald Trump and asked him who was to blame for
00:38the war. A very direct question and have a listen to his answer to me. Ukraine's NATO aspirations
00:46were one of the main reasons that the war broke out. Who do you blame for the war, Ukraine or
00:50Russia? Well I think this, I think that there are a lot of people to blame. All I can say is very
00:57simply, if I were president, that war would never have happened.
01:04Well as you heard in that soundbite there, Donald Trump hedging his bets really. I was
01:09expecting a bit more of a direct answer. Of course, dealing with the Biden administration
01:12for the last year or so, it would have been very much that Russia was to blame. But that has since
01:17shifted. Just a couple of days after that question, the question was put to him again
01:21by my colleague Jackie Heinrich and he changed his tune. Listen to this at Mar-a-Lago.
01:26But today I heard, oh well we weren't invited. Well you've been there for three years,
01:29you should have ended it three years. You should have never started it, you could have made a deal.
01:37So Donald Trump's shift in tone then, coupled with J.D. Vance's speech at the Munich
01:41security conference, raising alarm bells in Europe. Alarm bells, I'm told, are also being
01:46raised with US officials. US officials at the moment say that they are still in their support
01:52of Europe and there's nothing to worry about. Fraser, tell us about some of these developments
01:57then that might have shaped, prompted Trump's stance to shift so significantly over the past week.
02:08Well of course in the short term we had that war of words between Zelensky and Donald Trump.
02:13Zelensky saying that he thought Donald Trump lived in this disinformation space.
02:16Donald Trump then hitting back with that now infamous post on his social media platform,
02:22Truth Social, in which he called Zelensky a dictator without elections. That was what
02:27really got hairs raised in Europe. Well the White House has started to slightly walk back that
02:32rhetoric. They are now saying that the United States, it is time that the United States stopped
02:37paying for European security and for the war in Ukraine. But Mike Waltz, the national security
02:42advisor, spoke to reporters at the press briefing today and said that it's unacceptable that the US
02:50taxpayer continue to bear the burden, not only of the cost of the war in Ukraine,
02:54but the defense of Europe. But he also said that we fully support our NATO allies,
03:00we fully support the Article 5 commitment, but it's time for our European allies to step up.
03:05So the moment then is really Europe's to look at how they want to continue going forward and
03:11whether they continue to fully believe and trust in the Trump administration. Indeed, and the more
03:16you pick apart what they've said, Trump, Waltz, Vance, you see contradictions almost in every
03:22sentence. Fraser, thank you very much indeed. Fraser Jackson, our correspondent there, as you
03:26can see, situated near the White House.