Donald Trump again compared his legal troubles to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died last week at an Arctic penal colony where he was serving a prison sentence widely viewed as punishment for opposing Vladimir Putin.
Supporters of Navalny and western officials are calling his death a political assassination.
The former president was asked at a Fox News town hall Tuesday night about the recent verdict in his New York civil fraud trial, in which the judge handed down fines totaling over $400 million.
“It’s a form of Navalny,” Trump said. “It is a form of communism, or fascism.”
Trump had already drawn criticism for waiting more than 72 hours after Navalny‘s death to issue any comment about the Kremlin critic. When he finally mentioned him by name for the first time in a post on his social media site, the focus of the statement was not on Navalny, but his own legal woes and other grievances, like his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
