Following Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump, still reeling at his failed January 6 coup, marveled at the Russian dictator’s audacity. As he himself described it, Trump watched the events unfold with a certain awe: “‘This is genius,’” he recalled thinking, “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine… Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.” He added that the move was “very savvy.” Only later, facing criticism from his own party, did he admit that Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty was “appalling.”
Yet, since taking office, Trump hasn’t even been willing to offer that level of mild rebuke. Of late, the president has been rather sympathetic toward Putin in ways that seem to go well beyond establishing a working negotiating relationship. During his Oval Office ambush of Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, Trump expressed the strange notion that “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” including “a phony witch hunt” – as if Putin in some way had suffered from the American investigation into obvious – and well-documented – Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Even after calling Zelenskyy a “dictator,” Trump refused to use the term for Putin. And while he’s had no problem referring to the influx of undocumented immigrants as an “invasion,” his administration has backed off using such language to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine, as if the war was some sort of misunderstanding rather than an act of territorial aggression. When asked directly about the war’s beginning and if Russia had invaded, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth equivocated, telling a Fox News host that it was “a very complicated situation.”
