Donald Trump’s Oval Office attack on Ukraine’s president last month appeared to mark a very public realignment of America’s sympathies – away from Europe and towards Russia in a manner that few could have imagined during the Cold War years.
The Republican Party, now dominated by Trump’s “America First” MAGA movement, once considered the former Soviet Union “the evil empire” under Ronald Reagan and relished its collapse.
Today, the GOP stands accused of parroting Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric and some even refuse to admit the plain fact that Moscow began the war by invading its neighbor.
The White House itself has even been branded “an arm of the Kremlin” by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, a dramatic about-turn just weeks into the luxury real estate mogul’s second presidency.
“Every single day, you hear from the national security adviser, from the president of the United States, from his entire national security team, Kremlin talking points,” Murphy told CNN’s State of the Union in the wake of the Zelensky episode.
Perhaps even more damning was the assessment of Putin’s own spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, who said with a grin on state television: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”
With hindsight, the break with Zelensky – which was swiftly followed by the White House cutting off all American aid to Ukraine and demanding a public apology in exchange for peace negotiations on Trump’s terms – was a culmination, not a sudden new development.
This president has consistently celebrated authoritarians like Putin, Xi Jinping of China, Viktor Orban of Hungary and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as “tough” and “smart”, recognising their shared taste for power and similarly transactional approach to international relations. But it is the Russian leader who has cast the longest shadow over Trump’s political project.
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The likes of Steve Bannon, Trump’s one-time chief strategist and a key influence over MAGA thinking to this day, has long seen in Putin’s Russia not a repressive and corrupt gangster state bent on weakening democratic institutions, but rather a fellow white, Christian, conservative objector to the socially progressive values being championed by the liberals of western Europe and Democratic America.
Bannon said so as long ago as 2014, telling an audience that while Putin may be a “kleptocrat” and an “imperialist”, “traditionalists” like himself “believe that at least [he] is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism – and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country. They want to see nationalism for their country.”
Putin was evidently listening and moved to actively court the American right, welcoming a visiting delegation from the National Rifle Association in 2015, for instance.
Russia’s influence on the world stage was a dominant theme of the 2016 presidential race between Trump and Hillary Clinton – two years on from Putin’s first incursions into Ukraine – with the Kremlin accused of attempting to groom Republican operatives in the interest of getting Trump elected and the notorious Steele Dossier, alleging the existence of a kompromat on the candidate, eventually published.
Those suspicions were compounded when, not long after Trump entered the White House, it emerged that his son Donald Trump Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner and campaign manager Paul Manafort had attended a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer offering “dirt” on Clinton.
FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller was duly appointed to investigate the campaign’s rumored ties to Moscow, ultimately producing a report that stopped short of explicitly calling for the president’s indictment but did not exonerate him, an ordeal Trump recalled during the scolding of Zelensky.
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me – we went through a phony witch hunt when they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,” he fumed.
“[Putin] had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it.”
As early as July 2017, just a month into the Mueller investigation, James Kirchick of the Brookings Institution was pointing to a Morning Consult poll revealing that 49 percent of Republicans considered Moscow an ally.
Kirchick accused the party, under Trump, of becoming Putin’s “willing accomplice”, expressing disdain for the GOP’s apparent refusal to reflect on what it was about their impressionable leader that made him quite so attractive to the Kremlin.
His point was aptly illustrated when Trump and Putin met at the Helsinki summit in July 2018, at which the Russian successfully convinced his counterpart that he had played no part in election-meddling, leading the commander-in-chief to publicly side with the ex-KGB man over his own intelligence agencies.
Like George W Bush before him, Trump had looked Putin in the eye and seen a man with whom he thought he could do business.
Zelensky also played an important, albeit inadvertent, role in Trump’s first term. The American’s first impeachment was sparked by a whistleblower reporting on him presenting the Ukrainian with a quid pro quo, asking him to launch a nuisance investigation into Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s activities in his country or else a congressionally-approved $400m military aid shipment would be withheld.
The president insisted he was blameless but clearly never forgot nor forgave Zelensky’s part in the affair, just as MAGA has never gotten over its fixation with Hunter-related conspiracy theories.
The seeds of Trump’s personal identification with Putin, born out of admiration and resentment, may have been sown between 2016 and 2019 but the Republicans’ Russophilia pre-dated his ascendancy and carried on without him, only growing with the outbreak of the war when Trump was holed up in Mar-a-Lago following his 2020 election defeat and the disgrace of January 6.
Ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump’s director of national intelligence, tweeted in 2022 that the conflict would never have started had Biden and Nato “simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns”, future VP Vance expressed indifference over Kyiv’s possible defeat, Tucker Carlson flew out for a softball in-person interview with Putin and Georgia populist Marjorie Taylor Greene praised his regime for “protecting Christianity.”
With the last of the Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger driven from the GOP, MAGA’s takeover is complete and there appears to be no one left to question the pro-Russia mood.
In the case of Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky, a democratic ally more commonly heralded as a hero, the likes of Lauren Boebert, Ted Cruz, Tim Burchett and Lindsey Graham all applauded, as did the friendly pundits on Fox News, with no dissenting voices heard from the Republican side.
“The truth is that MAGA rejects modern America,” Alexei Bayer wrote in The Globalist last year, rubbishing the movement’s claims to patriotism. “It hates its diversity, minority rights and permissiveness and looks back to some mystical past.”