News came last week of the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny last week. He had survived an attempted assassination by poison in 2020 but eventually returned to Russia, where he was immediately detained and sentenced first to two and a half years, then nine years and ultimately 19 years in prison on charges of "extremism." In December he was sent to a distant prison in the Russian Arctic. And now he is gone.
Navalny was the most famous political dissident in the world, probably since Nelson Mandela. Those who care about such things held out hope that he would survive incarceration, as Mandela did, and prevail one day in a new Russia. In this era of rising authoritarianism, the death of this man — and his bravery in embodying a dream of freedom and liberty, now for the moment crushed — adds more fuel to fears of the creeping fascism now gaining traction around the world.
For those of us in the U.S., this is particularly distressing because the timing of Navalny's death feels as though it may be directly connected to the unhinged rhetoric of Donald Trump, the putative presidential nominee of the Republican Party. It's true that an "election" is scheduled soon in Russia in which it is certain that President Vladimir Putin will be triumphant. There has been some speculation that Navalny's death was related to that, although it's hard to understand how that would help Putin domestically. More likely the killing of Navalny is a show of strength following the comments Trump has been making on the campaign trail that if he becomes president again he will give the green light to Russia to invade any NATO country he deems not to have "paid its bills." (This is based upon his unshakably ignorant insistence that NATO is like one of his golf clubs that require members to pay dues — to him — and there's no disabusing him of it.) His exact words were, "I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want," which were heard all over the world as a sign that America was on the verge of abandoning Europe on a fatuous pretext in favor of Russia.
This fear is not unreasonable, considering that the Republicans in Congress have successfully blocked funding for aid to Ukraine on the explicit orders of Donald Trump. That impasse came after Republicans demanded that Democrats and the White House agree to a draconian immigration bill in exchange. They eventually did, but in the end the GOP refused to back the bill anyway because Trump apparently believes it would help Joe Biden's re-election campaign.
You have to wonder whether that's the real reason he nixed the deal. After all, Biden signing that immigration bill would have further inflamed the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is already upset about the president's policy on Israel. It's a perfect wedge issue. Instead, the Democrats are now able to say they tried, and get to blame the Republicans for refusing to take yes for an answer.
And consider this: a Gallup poll from last year shows that siding with Russia remains extremely unpopular among Americans at large, despite Tucker Carlson's paeans to Moscow's subways and grocery stores and Trump's admiration for Putin.
A Pew survey released just last week shows that 74% of Americans view the war in Ukraine as “important to U.S. interests,” and that includes 69% of Republicans. The pro-Putin faction in the GOP is not as big as liberal political observers often believe it is, and it certainly isn't big enough to explain the way Congress is handling the issue in an election year — beyond, that is, their need to show fealty to Trump.
It's certainly possible that Trump's political judgment is not all it's cracked up to be. He lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes, after all, no matter how loudly he denies it. So it's curious that Trump is once again favoring Putin's goals, even at the apparent expense of his own. He's been doing that ever since he came on the political scene, for reasons no one has ever been able to adequately explain.
When the news broke about Navalny's death, everyone waited with bated breath to see what Trump would say about it. Would he, for the first time, condemn Vladimir Putin? Would he side with America's allies? And what would the Republican Party do?
It wasn't long before we got our answers and they were predictably grotesque:
I think Gingrich was one of the first to compare Trump to Navalny but he wasn't the last. It took Trump himself three days before he could bring himself to say anything. When he did, it was to echo what Gingrich said:
Trump has embraced this ludicrous idea that he's the American Navalny, being persecuted by the tyrant Joe Biden. But by doing that he's implicitly admitting that Putin is a tyrant too, which is unusual. If you wanted to give him credit for being clever, you might think Trump was trying to appease the vast number of Republicans who don't admire Putin as much as he does while maintaining his martyr status among his cultish flock. But in reality it was just another excuse for him to whine about how badly he is being persecuted, which is his one and only 2024 campaign message.
On Tuesday night, Trump appeared on Fox News. When asked about Navalny's death, he said it was "sad" but implied that Navalny should have known better than to come back to Russia because he knew what was likely to happen. He never said a word about his pal Putin, perhaps hoping the world wouldn't notice that he was suggesting Putin was as bad as the monstrous Joe Biden.
When asked about the fines he's been ordered to pay in his New York fraud case he replied:
Trump on his Civil Fraud Fine: It’s a form of Navalny pic.twitter.com/0tQMea3Jci
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 21, 2024
That's gibberish but the point was clear enough. Ordering him to pay up is somehow or other equivalent to being killed in an arctic gulag. In fact, he'd gone further than that in a rally earlier in the day:
Trump: "They say the president that was treated the worst was Abraham Lincoln...Lincoln And Jackson was treated badly,...And I haven't seen the new list (of presidents treated badly), but if I'm not number one, over Lincoln, I will be very disappointed."pic.twitter.com/GVraG8l2oi
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) February 21, 2024
Trump insists that he is being treated worse than Navalny — and worse than Abraham Lincoln — because he is a spoiled rich boy who has never been held to account for anything he's done in his life. On some level, I imagine he believes it. But those two men were murdered. He is being held to account through judicial due process, even as he's running for president, flying around the country in his private jet, hawking gold sneakers and being feted nightly at his gaudy mansion in Palm Beach by his wealthy paying customers.
No one has ever pitied himself more than Donald J. Trump — certainly not Lincoln or Navalny, who were brave leaders trying to change the world for future generations, not whiners who believed everything in the world revolved around them. As former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer observed, Trump is no "strongman." He is a very weak man, desperately trying to outrun accountability for a lifetime of failure. The reason he cozies up to the likes of Vladimir Putin is because he's a coward who would rather "preemptively surrender to protect himself than fight to protect others."
He's exactly the opposite of someone like Alexei Navalny. So, by the way, are the pathetic Republicans politicians who follow Trump like a horde of lemmings as he tries to lead the nation and the world over the cliff.
