This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 12 Episode of “Velshi”.

For the past few months, as part of an ongoing series on “Velshi,” we've been showing viewers “Inside Project 2025,” the 922-page right-wing playbook for a second Trump presidency. However, knowing what may lie ahead, it is important to look back at the previous Trump administration and remind ourselves of what he has already done, how he governed, and how he would likely do it all again.

Because as the great Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Consider Donald Trump's interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last week we were reminded of their unconventional relationship after veteran journalist Bob Woodward's new book “War” reported that Trump and Putin have spoken several times since Trump left office and since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (Neither NBC News nor MSNBC have independently verified Woodward's report.)

While Trump and the Kremlin deny this reporting, the former president and his friends in Russia are out of step on another revelation. According to Woodward, Trump secretly sent Covid-19 testing machines to Putin in 2020 for his personal use – at a time when testing was hard to come by in America. Trump has rejected these claims. The Kremlin has confirmed them.

Trump's overarching relationship with the Russian dictator — his envy of Putin's power, his admiration for Putin's oppression, his rejection of Putin's crimes — is undeniable. And that was clear from the first attacks of Trump's presidency.

Trump and Putin first met in person in July 2017 during a G20 summit in Germany. Trump and Putin, together with Foreign Minister Rex Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and two interpreters, met for two hours in Hamburg behind closed doors.

As the Washington Post first reported, after the meeting, Trump took the interpreters' notes and instructed them not to inform anyone about the meeting. This would become an unofficial policy. In 2019, the Post reported that there were no detailed or secret records of Trump and Putin's first five in-person meetings.

About a year after Hamburg there was a summit in Helsinki. Trump and Putin emerged from another meeting in which Trump did not allow notes. And later at a news conference, Trump, standing next to Putin, defied his own intelligence officials by taking Putin's word that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election.

When Putin “won” re-election in 2018, Trump was reportedly sent to a White House press conference with the sage advice: Don’t congratulate Putin on winning an election that was neither free nor fair. But he still congratulated the Russian president.

“I called President Putin to congratulate him on his victory, his election victory,” Trump told reporters at the time.

This kind of deference is not only unseemly for a president, it is also political leverage for an opponent. According to Woodward's new book, Putin knew that receiving Covid tests from Trump was a political liability – not for him, but for Trump:

Putin himself had a sense of something Trump didn't: that an American president shouldn't secretly communicate with a global adversary or send him the Covid tests in short supply.

Let's go back to that first meeting in Germany in 2017. According to the New York Times, Tillerson briefed his advisers shortly after the meeting, saying, “We still have a lot of work to do to change the president's mind on Ukraine.” That's because, as the Times reports, Tillerson was watching watched Putin tell a big story about Ukraine – all the propaganda he would later use to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine – and he watched as Trump bought every word.

According to that report, Trump entered the meeting with talking points from his advisers to challenge Putin, but the president didn't use any of them. Trump even asked Putin what he thought about the US sending weapons to Ukraine. Not surprisingly, Putin said it would be a mistake, and Trump seemed to listen.

In 2019, Trump held what he called a “perfect phone call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which he pressured the Ukrainian leader to smear his political rival Joe Biden. This request involved millions in military aid, which Trump temporarily withheld from Ukraine. Trump was later impeached because of that phone call. (He was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.)

Trump's apathy toward Ukraine, his preference for Putin over U.S. officials, the secret phone calls and widespread admiration for an autocrat all make one wonder how things might play out in a second Trump term.

As Angelou wisely warned, “Believe them the first time.”

Ali Velshi

Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He won the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special about the near-collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and the Chicago red light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two Emmy Award nominations for news and documentary, in addition to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism reporting.

Armand Manoukian And Allison Detzel contributed.