As I write this, Ukrainians are pulling corpses from the rubble in Kyiv. A massive Russian aerial attack killed at least 19 civilians, four of them children. It was a major escalation, with 629 missiles and drones aimed at the Ukrainian capital. The British Council building was targeted, as was the European Union mission.
Let me make a firm prediction. By the time you read this column, there will have been no U.S. retaliation. President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin with “very severe consequences” if he did not agree to a ceasefire. Yet the Russian despot has again treated his U.S. counterpart with contempt.
A week earlier, Russia carefully destroyed a U.S.-owned business in the far west of Ukraine, miles from the front lines, closer to Budapest than to Kyiv. How did the ultimate “America First” president react to this deliberate and insolent provocation? Did he demand reparations and threaten retribution? Of course not. As always, he was wheedling and subservient with Putin, saving his tough-guy pose for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
When Trump was asked two weeks after the Alaska summit what happened to those promised “severe consequences,” Trump responded, “Zelensky’s not exactly innocent either.” Well, maybe not, but so what? Whatever the failings of its leader, Ukraine was attacked without provocation by a country to which it offered no threat. That country, the aggressor throughout, is now deliberately upping the ante, targeting U.S. and European real estate, and getting away with it.
I have given up trying to understand Trump’s motives. Is he still sore about the whole Russiagate thing? Does Putin have something on him? Is it his reflexive fawning toward autocracies and autocrats? Is there a personal financial motive? It doesn’t matter much. Frankly, I struggle to see what Trump would have done differently if he really were a Russian asset.
What saddens me more is how Americans go along with it. There is the usual MAGA doublethink. It is treasonable to suggest that Trump is working with the Russians; yet it is also treasonable to criticize the Russians while he is trying to make nice with them. Trump decreed the double standard, telling Fox News, “We have tremendous potential to have a great relationship, a great business relationship. But we couldn’t do it because of the crooked, demented people that created the phony ‘Russia, Russia, Russia.’”
Got that? Only the demented people on the Left talk about Trump’s collusion with Russia. Also, they should shut the hell up, because they’re damaging Trump’s collusion with Russia.
Even by the lights of MAGA logic, this is hard to process. The whole point of Trump, according to his supporters, is that he is tough, he takes the battle to the other side, and he owns the liberals. Never mind his coarseness, disloyalty to allies, fiscal recklessness, disdain for constitutional norms, and avarice. At least he stands up for the United States. At least he is prepared to do whatever it takes to win.
Yet, here he is being knocked around by a tinpot dictator whose country has an economy about the same size as New York’s. Every time Trump is duped, every time he backs down, every time he pleads for restraint only to be answered by another missile strike, the U.S.’s prestige suffers, and MAGA laps it up.
Is this simply a willingness to turn on a dime as Trump’s personal interests and whims dictate? Or is it actual admiration for Putin? Until now, I have dismissed this second possibility as too hideously un-American to contemplate. When I see Trump-supporting accounts extolling the Kremlin kleptocrat as a patriot and an upholder of Christian civilization, I dismiss them as Russian propaganda, but I am starting to wonder. Look, for example, at the rapturous reception given by post-liberals to Michael Warren Davis’s book The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” Isn’t Enough, which argues, completely unironically, that European serfdom was a happier condition than modern American liberty.
Yes, it’s an outlier, but it is also indicative of the direction that the so-called “New Right” wants to go, namely, a society governed by the full coercive force of state power where we find fulfilment not in deciding how to live, but in pushing our preferences onto everyone else. If that is your bag, while you might regard Trump’s strongman rule as preferable to capitalist democracy, you will presumably see Putin’s full-fat tyranny as better than either. If this is the direction in which the Right is moving, the American experiment is over.