Trump, Putin, Ukraine, and the future of the GOP

THAT RELATIVE radio silence we’ve observed from Team Trump recently is not an accident. Well, it’s partly unintended consequences; the instant faceplant of Trump’s Truth Social website did keep the former president from elevating his profile in his usual bellicose fashion. Still, despite being just seven months from the midterm elections, there’s a sense that the Trump 2024 campaign is in hunkerdown mode, planning, negotiating, gathering nuts and dry powder for the fall.

And there’s likely another explanation for the comparative quiet of Donald Trump, his enablers and minions. It’s an explanation evolving – exploding – half a world away.

Thanks to the expansionist antics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, war is on the march in Europe, for the first time since World War II. Putin’s scorched-earth war against neighbor Ukraine has led to the deaths of thousands since the war started on Feb. 24, and the displacement of more than 3 million Ukrainians fleeing into other countries, the fastest such transition of human beings to refugee status in history.

But however long this criminal action takes to play out, sooner or later Putin loses. The global community has closed ranks against the invasion with a refreshing solidarity, with initiatives from world governments, the private sector, and millions of everyday people worldwide. And while Putin will eventually take his place in the pantheon of the defeated, there’s already one certified loser in all of this right now: Donald Trump.

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You don’t have to go that far back into American history to find numerous examples of Trump’s rhetorical dalliances with Russia’s maximum leader. From at least 2013 -- well before his candidacy -- and throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump had many favorable things to say about Putin, praising his toughness and style of leadership (do klepto-autocrats really have more than one style of rule?) and going out of his way to make Putin sound like the greatest thing since sliced governance.

Fast forward to now. With much of the country behind him on this (if nothing else), President Biden has been the direct and incidental beneficiary of an array of unexpected global events. Biden – an old hand at foreign relations going back to the ‘70’s, during his early years in the Senate -- has been praised for having a steady hand in navigating the situation (certainly compared to the geopolitical chaos of the Trump administration), and for not rushing into stopgap solutions that satisfy in the short run without achieving real and targeted progress longer-term. The intelligence community under Biden has been similarly praised for getting it right on Putin’s intentions well before the invasion.

And nothing breeds success like success. Apparently, “Sleepy Joe” –- Trump’s phrase for the president -- wasn’t so “sleepy” after all. Biden’s straightforward, collab approach, already gaining him traction with voters after the State of the Union, has won him more support throughout the country and on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers of both stripes have had no problem identifying Putin as the villain of the piece. All of which is a problem for the presidential asterisk and Putin apologist from Mar-a-Lago.

When you unabashedly praise a dictator like Putin, when you call into question the veracity of your own intelligence services, when you give aid and comfort to a manifest enemy of the United States – and then a shooting war breaks out thanks to the recklessness of that enemy – you got some ‘splaining to do. At least if you want to be president of more than the Mar-a-Lago Chamber of Commerce.

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OF COURSE, TRUMP isn’t well-known for explaining anything to anyone, least of all himself. Anathema to impulse control, Trump has a history of shooting from the hip in business and in politics. He did it again between Feb. 24, the day of the invasion, and Feb. 27, before party activists and donors at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Miami, rekindling the old Putin bromance by calling the tyrant “smart” and a “genius” for orchestrating the deadly and needless incursion into a neighboring country.

Speaking at CPAC, Trump attempted to modulate his praise for Putin with an obligatorily human response to the tragedy unfolding in Kyiv, Mariupol, and other cities in a beleaguered Ukraine – while  incredibly, at the same time, blaming Western leaders for forcing Putin’s hand. "The problem is not that Putin is smart, which, of course, he's smart," Trump said. "The problem is that our leaders are dumb... and so far, allowed him to get away with this travesty and assault on humanity."

Back in the day, in the first blush of his presidency, Trump’s bon mots for Putin at least had the imagistic advantage of being a novelty, something fresh -- that cherished asset in American politics. Trump got some bizzarro-world brownie points for daring to say what he said on behalf of a once and future adversary – most notably at the 2018 press conference in Helsinki. It was, of course, dangerously provocative, globally disrespectful, and blindingly disloyal; it was also cheeky and unique, and one hell of a way to stand out from all the other American presidents that preceded him.

It’s different this time. And bigly. The man who would incinerate Europe is more of a danger than he was in 2014, the last time Ukraine unceremoniously ushered Russian forces out the door after an invasion. And Putin’s inamorato in statecraft – the man who damn near incinerated America – is more of a known political quantity now than in 2014. We know more about Trump. We know more about Putin. And we know more about ourselves. We all do. Even those in Trump’s own party. And as Europe deals with war, we can see power brokers in the GOP quietly wrestling with an identity disconnect they didn’t war-game for: What to do when the leader of the GOP has a bromance with a clear and present danger to the national security, and the security of a world threatened by a war the GOP leader’s pal started?

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Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the reigning Prince of Darkness and John Calhoun’s deputy on earth, is nonetheless a captive of good political sense. Before the invasion, McConnell told Fox News that there “should be no confusion about Vladimir Putin. He’s a thug. He’s a killer,” McConnell said. “He’s been on the rampage and this will not end well for him.”

In this moment of deep global uncertainty, McConnell may or may not have known what to do, but he sure as hell knew what not to do. What horse not to ride.

So did Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president once loyal to a fault. At a dinner for GOP donors on March 4, Pence offered a full-throated defense of NATO, and a spirited pushback against Trump orthodoxy. “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin,” he said, according to his prepared remarks, as reported by AP. “There is only room for champions of freedom.”

Even a reliable Trump mouthpiece like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said, in full throat before a microphone, said Putin was “the bad guy” in the scenario, driving his own wedge, large or small, between himself and the man who would be America’s king. It’s other little cleavages, small rhetorical carve-outs like these that Trump should be concerned about. They’re evidence of political fault lines starting to appear. They’re the fissures of the future.

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IN WAYS NO one wants to talk about out loud for attribution, they signal that the Republican Party is just so over Donald Trump. This is that stage in a relationship when one party knows it’s history but either can’t work up the nerve to say so to the second party – or the first party hopes the second party will be self-aware enough to see it’s over without being told.

Look at the yawn of a response to the soft launch of Truth Social. The Daily Beast reported on Friday, March 4: “The Daily Beast reviewed analyses of visits to Truth Social’s performed by SimilarWeb, which tracks website traffic from public and private sources. The company’s figures for the MAGA social network—while only an estimate based on incomplete data — are nonetheless anemic. Trump’s own social media platform is doing either worse or the same as other MAGA social sites like Gab — another pro-Trump competitor website that’s especially beloved by, well, Nazis — and Gettr, a platform fronted by one of Trump’s former top political aides, Jason Miller.

“SimilarWeb’s estimates show a sharp spike of around 2 million daily visits to the site when it first debuted, before traffic dipped to an average of approximately 300,000 visits each day, putting the site on par with Gettr. Meanwhile, the far-right Gab has averaged around 650,000 daily average visits in the same time period,” the Beast reported. “As of Friday, Truth Social was the 72nd most popular free app in Apple’s AppStore, a far cry from Facebook (5th) and his formerly beloved Twitter (22) ...”

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PUTIN IS TRUMP’S problem, and Trump is the Republican Party’s problem. The GOP’s identity crisis, already the stuff of political and psychoanalytic legend, has an unwelcome fresh dimension. A Republican party susceptible to the winds of change and the tide of public opinion is now in the position of reflexively bending the knee to Trump, the party leader, who just as reflexively shows at least rhetorical loyalty to the dictator trying to enslave the Ukrainian people with the deadliest, most ruinous brandishing of military force in Europe since World War II.

This is a wall-sized dilemma for the party that was once reliably a bulwark against Russia, Communism, and all, uh, un-American activities. Some Republicans, realizing the scope and breadth of this vein-popping conundrum in progress, have stopped talking about Trump or the January 6 Insurrection altogether if there’s any suspicion of linkage with Putin and events in Ukraine. 

But that blithe silence isn’t nearly good enough from the Repubs months before an election, even the historically advantageous occasion of a midterm election. At this dire global moment, before a restive domestic audience, the contradictions for Trump and the GOP are inescapable, especially the one they can’t outrun or spin:

The longer the war in Ukraine continues, the clearer it is that Putin is already guilty of the implicit war crime of starting a war in the first place (never mind other war crimes to come), the worse it reflects on former president Trump, his character, his judgment, his patriotism, his grasp of political optics, and his talent for picking his friends. And the worse Trump looks specifically, the worse, the more politically desperate the Republicans look in general for dutifully standing by his side.

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That’s why GOP lawmakers have started to pivot toward their more traditional, anti-Russian posture – and toward common ground with the Democrats. On March 2, in a rare senatorial expression of joint outrage, Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski joined with West Virginia Democrat and Build Back Better executioner Joe Manchin in releasing a statement on Putin, the war in Ukraine, and the ways Putin is leveraging Russia’s formidable oil and natural gas reserves against a European continent that needs them badly.

“Vladimir Putin has used energy as a weapon of war. Russia’s actions demand a fundamental rethinking of American national security and our national and international energy policy,” the senators wrote.

Trump's sadly automatic praise for Putin shows a man who's missed the moment of this moment. The bipartisan, supportive reaction to a groundbreaking address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is the latest example of Trump out of step with the party he purports to lead. 

Zelensky spoke March 16 in a virtual address to the U.S. Congress, making what some have called a Churchillian defense of Ukraine, an oratorically ringing stand in pursuit of more involvement, more skin in the game, from the NATO powers -- especially the United States. Zelensky's address was warmly received on both sides of the aisle.

When the times demand that such bipartisan overtures be the exceptional rule rather than the comfortable exception, Republican leadership will be hard pressed to persist in obstruction as political reflex, for its own sake. Never mind the childish antics of presumptive GOP barometers and braying embarrassments Lauren Bohbert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, acting the fool at the State of the Union address. The rank-and-file gets it: in this climate, the stakes are too high for the ritual sniping Washington is used to. Too high for not taking the right side. 

None of which is good news for Donald Trump. Even with the prospect of winning seats in the midterm -- likely but by no means a guarantee -- it’s all hands on deck for a Republican party that doesn’t really want the leader it’s saddled with, a leader who breaks more furniture than he builds, one whose current stance athwart the party’s own geopolitical history, and its needs in the here and now, make the work of the GOP finding its identity today that much harder to achieve.

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Image credits: Putin and Trump: Evan Vucci/Associated Press. Biden: Saul Loeb, Getty Images. Truth Social logo: Copyright 2022 Truth Social. CPAC logo: Conservative Political Action Conference. Mitch McConnell: Reuters. Zelensky: Poll image from Ukrainian government video.