Donald Trump is a worse appeaser in his attitude to Vladimir Putin and Russia than the 1930s British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was towards Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, a senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee said.
Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the committee, also said Trump acted like a “single-cell organism” in obstructing aid to Ukraine.
Comparisons between the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee and Chamberlain, who failed to avoid world war by appeasing Hitler, gave Trump “way too much credit”, Himes said, in an interview with the One Decision Podcast, co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of the British intelligence service MI6, and Indira Lakshmanan, a guest host.
“They both may be undertaking an act of appeasement,” Himes added, “but Neville Chamberlain, love him or hate him, I think probably thought this through.
“Donald Trump is a little bit of a single-celled organism: he responds to one stimulus and one stimulus only, which is, ‘Does this make me feel good or does it make me feel bad?’ And Ukraine makes him feel bad because he got impeached over Ukraine.”
Trump’s enthusiasm for Putin and other authoritarians is also widely discussed but Trump’s first impeachment did arise from attempts to blackmail Ukraine, withholding military supplies needed to fend off Russian aggression while demanding dirt on rivals including Joe Biden.
Acquitted by Senate Republicans, Trump was impeached and acquitted a second time for inciting the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021.
Three years on, notwithstanding 91 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties, Trump is all but confirmed as the Republican nominee to face Joe Biden in November. As such, he has ensured that Republicans led by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, have blocked new Ukraine aid.
Most observers believe that in the third year of war, Kyiv faces stalemate or damaging defeats against its Russian invaders if US support ceases.
Dearlove called Himes, 57 and in his eighth term in Congress, “one of the sanest political voices that I’ve heard recently in the United States, given all the concern about forthcoming presidential election”, adding that Himes should be “listened to carefully … particularly about Ukraine”.
Under Trump’s “America first” outlook, Himes said, “two things are happening in the Republican party. One, some people are channeling that traditional isolationism which we’ve lived with in this country forever. And by the way, it’s not a terrible instinct, right? There are episodes in our history where we probably should have been a bit more isolationist.
“But then you have Donald Trump as a single-celled organism saying ‘Ukraine bad’ and his acolytes … saying, ‘The boss thinks it’s bad.’ And, you know, an awful lot of my colleagues just realise that if they stand up and say things contrary to what the cult leader is saying, they’ll put their own careers at risk.”
At the recent Munich security conference, Himes said “Republican after Republican” told him it was “absolutely essential that we get this aid done”.
But referring to a touted congressional mechanism by which Johnson might be bypassed and aid advanced, he said: “The question I want [Republicans] to answer is, ‘Will you sign a discharge petition, which will get you in trouble with the speaker? Is it that important? And the answer … is no.
“They’re not going to take a risk on behalf of Ukraine.”
