WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump may view Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin as a “competitor" who is “not my enemy,” but a new poll being released Wednesday shows a large majority of Americans do not share the same opinion.
The NBC News|SurveyMonkey online poll found that only 23% see Russia as friendly and only 5% say the nation is “an ally to our country." More than two-thirds polled said Russia was either unfriendly (43%) or a U.S. enemy (25%).
The NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll of 5,300 adults was conducted between July 9-15, 2018, before Monday’s summit between Trump and Putin. The survey’s margin of error: plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.
The poll results on Russia mostly mirror Americans’ views from October 2017, but were slightly higher from a similar poll taken a year ago.
The survey also found that a plurality of Americans (27%) think Russia “currently poses the greatest immediate threat to the United States in comparison to North Korea, ISIS, China and Iran). Those results are also higher than last October or last summer.
Throughout his tour of Europe last week, Trump told reporters he saw Putin as a "competitor," not an enemy or a friend.
"Not a question of friend or enemy. He’s not my enemy. And hopefully, someday, maybe he’ll be a friend. It could happen,” Trump said.
Trump was in damage control mode Tuesday in trying to quell the furor over his pro-Putin comments at Monday's summit in Helsinki. Speaking before a meeting with Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee, he said he accepts the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Russians interfered with the 2016 election – but that others could have been involved as well.
He also said he reviewed a video of his remarks with Putin after seeing the negative attention they received. He said that he misspoke during the news conference and that he meant to say he saw no reason why it "wouldn't" be Russia that interfered in the election.
Other poll findings:
A majority of Americans (59%) are not confident that the federal government is doing enough to prevent foreign countries from influencing future U.S. elections.
Almost half (45%) think cyber-attacks pose the greatest immediate threat to the country compared to terrorist attacks (31%), nuclear attacks (19%) or conventional military attacks (2%).
Almost six in 10 polled (59%) are worried that the U.S. will be at war in the next four years.
On NATO membership, 81% of those surveyed think it is good for the U.S. and only 15% think it’s bad.
North Korea is viewed as either unfriendly (45%) or an enemy (38%) to the U.S.
Like North Korea, 82% of those polled consider Iran either unfriendly (46%) or an enemy (36%) of the U.S. Less than half say China is unfriendly (40%) or a U.S. enemy (9%), the poll found.
A majority of those surveyed (53%) oppose building a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, while 43% support the plan. A vast majority, 70%, believe most undocumented immigrants working in the U.S. “should be offered a chance to apply for legal status.”