New York Mag - Trump has finally remade Republicans into Putin's playthings. [View all]

[TomCADem]

Timely article from New York Magazine, but I think it understates the transactional nature of Republican support. Like Trump, I think many modern Republicans are supporting Russia because they know they will get a lot of Russian sock puppet support in social media, which can be extremely helpful in the primaries. Thus, they parrot the pro-Putin talking points and, in return, they suddenly get a lot of momentum in social media.

This wasn't always unique to Republicans, but given how Russia has invaded Ukraine, tried to influence the election in support of Trump, and has pushed racist, misogynistic, and discriminated against many religions at home, it is tough to reconcile support of Russia with the Democratic platform. Thus, even Russian sock puppet support of Democrats like Tulsi Gabbard ends up looking hollow.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-republicans-vladimir-putin-puppets.html

In 2017, a Republican-controlled Congress passed a package of sanctions on Russia in retaliation for its interference in the previous year’s election. The bill was approved by overwhelming margins: 419-3 in the House, 98-2 in the Senate. President Trump, the Washington Post later reported, was apoplectic over the vote and contemplated a veto, only to be eventually persuaded that he would look weak when Congress overrode it. Instead, he signed the bill without the normal ceremony while criticizing it as “unconstitutional.”

This is a measure of how deeply isolated and weird Trump’s views on Russia were within his party at the time. Trump has consistently flattered Russia, touted its economic possibilities, and disparaged the alliances arrayed against it. Whatever the basis of his beliefs on the subject — whether from frank admiration of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, the praise he has received from Russians since the 1980s, or his business dealings — sympathy toward Russia is one of the few policy principles from which he has never wavered. At a closed-door meeting in 2016, Kevin McCarthy told Paul Ryan, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Dana Rohrabacher was a gadfly in the House mocked for his idiosyncratic Russophilia; Republicans saw Trump the same way.

In 2024, the picture looks very different. The faction of Republicans willing to align themselves with Trump on Russia has swelled to the point where House Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to allow a vote on Ukraine aid. The Ukrainian military is starved of ammunition and retreating, NATO is contemplating its own mortality, and Europe is trembling at the prospect of future Russian aggression, which Trump says he would encourage. But his admiration of Putin no longer renders him strange or suspect within the party. Increasingly, the hawks are cast as oddballs. The metamorphosis Trump wrought through sheer force of personality may ultimately be the most globally significant ramification of his political career.

Trump’s apologists like to claim that “Trump, and his administration, have actually been tougher on Russia than many of his predecessors,” as Byron York of the Washington Examiner put it. But this is a half-truth at best. Trump spent his presidency prying apart the western alliance. He repeated a series of bizarre pro-Moscow claims — insisting, for example, that the NATO treaty committed the U.S. to backing the “very aggressive” Montenegro in a war on Russia — and refused to condemn any of Putin’s crimes. When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned by a rare nerve agent in 2020 and every western intelligence agency blamed the obvious suspect, Trump demurred, “I think probably China, at this point, is a nation that you should be talking about much more so than Russia because the things that China is doing are far worse if you take a look at what’s happening with the world.”