While most Americans pull for Ukraine and its resistance to Russia’s invasion, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., recently called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “thug” and labeled his government “incredibly evil.” It’s part of a broader phenomenon among hard-right politicians who have found a soft spot for Russia and its monstrous leader. It’s time to ask some hard questions about the American right’s fetishization of Vladimir Putin’s violent autocracy.
Historically, hawkish conservatives were the toughest talkers regarding America’s chief global adversary. Even after the fall of Soviet communism, U.S. politicians understood (until recently) that a non-communist Russia didn’t necessarily mean a non-threatening Russia. Russia’s post-communist government has never fully embraced democracy and lost ground on that front under Putin. Russia’s nuclear arsenal remains an existential threat to humanity.
Yet there’s Tucker Carlson on Fox News, blithely declaring that America has no legitimate interest in opposing Russia’s unprovoked invasion of a nascent democracy. As Mother Jones reported Sunday, a Kremlin propaganda office has distributed a memo telling state-controlled media to “use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson.”
How proud Carlson must be to see his name written — in Russian — on an official Kremlin document.
Then there’s the recent white nationalist event that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene attended in Florida. As if her implied acceptance of the group’s flagrant racism wasn’t bad enough, Greene took the stage even after the crowd applauded Russia and chanted Putin’s name. Add to that Cawthorn’s savage assessment of a U.S. ally that Russia is currently pounding mercilessly — and his and other conservative votes against sanctioning Russia or providing military aid to Ukraine — and it’s clear that, in this battle between a democracy and an autocracy, today’s hard-right feels kinship with the latter.
Is this trend toward Kremlin-coddling by the American right as simple as following Donald Trump’s lead? For whatever mysterious reasons, the ex-president’s deference to Putin while he was in office was nothing less than bizarre. From his grotesque endorsement of Putin’s lies on the podium in Helsinki, to his abandonment of Kurdish military allies in Syria, to his undermining of the NATO alliance, to his attempt to strong-arm Zelenskyy for political help by endangering its defense against Russia, Trump couldn’t have been more helpful to the Kremlin if he’d been on its payroll.
Trump, still in Putin’s thrall, initially called his invasion of Ukraine “genius.” After some blowback, he resorted to tougher language against Russia — though he still refuses to say an unkind word regarding Putin. Even in a remarkable Fox News interview last week, in which Trump-friendly host Sean Hannity all but implored him to acknowledge that Putin is “evil,” Trump wouldn’t do it.
Hannity, for once, is right: Putin is evil. And the American right’s embrace of this particular brand of evil indicates it isn’t just Ukraine’s problem.
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