He was also right about them not pulling their weight for NATO. Germany are Putin’s biggest enablers in Europe. I think.
Trump was definitely right about that.
But yet for all the wankers saying Putin wouldn't do anything on Trump's watch, they conveniently have the classic self-absorbed US myopics to not even consider that Angela Merkel could say the same thing... and she's the one who just left office.
Personally, i think it's stupid to reduce Putin's actions to another single person. (Like Putin plans around others rather than through them.

) But I would argue that even if you went there, Merkel has a stronger case than Trump.
If you want to blame a US president for modern Russia then it should be Bill Clinton, who happily turned a blind eye to the various democratic failures and roll-backs under Yeltsin (that paved the way for Putin’s centralized/autocratic power structure) in the name of economic reforms (which created the oligarchy)
Expanding NATO in the 90s was a dumb pile-on, save for maybe the Baltics who are like cockroaches sleeping next to a 800-lb bear. But again, people who think like this are the same idiots who blame a missed handball call against Juve in the 8th minute for why they lost the match.