There is a street in Tbilisi named after George W. Bush. Count the world’s capitals with a street named for an American president. It will not take you long.
For years, Georgia was the largest non-NATO contributor of troops in Afghanistan. For years, International Republican Institute polling found roughly three-quarters of Georgians backing a pro-Western course. I come from a family that spent three generations inside the Soviet system. We know what America is worth, precisely because we remember life without it.
Today, the same people curse America.
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The first source is no mystery. Bidzina Ivanishvili‘s state machine and its propaganda channels recycle Russian narratives — the “Global War Party,” the “deep state,” Washington as the headquarters of conspiracy. An authoritarian government tilting toward Moscow smears America. That is page one of the playbook, and nobody should be surprised by it.
The surprise is the second source: the opposition media and the opposition’s own leaders — the camp that calls itself pro-Western, the camp Washington has spent two decades backing as Georgia’s pro-Western alternative.
Someone will object that criticizing President Donald Trump is not cursing America. True. The distinction matters, and I hold to it. So watch the ladder instead.
Step one is the man.
In November 2020, opposition leader Shalva Natelashvili went on air hoping Americans would remove Trump — “Putin’s lobbyist in the United States.” In February 2024, on air again: Trump’s election was “impermissible for the security of the entire world.” Nika Gvaramia, founder of the Mtavari channel, spent Election Day 2024 mocking the Georgian emigres living in America and finding “Darwinian natural selection” in their choice. His summary of Trump’s diplomacy that winter: “Let Russia annex Crimea and Donbas, and China take Taiwan. Got it?” Three months later, the same Gvaramia led a rally on Rustaveli Avenue appealing to Secretary of State Marco Rubio for help. In February, America is a punch line. In May, a friend you beg. One leader, two registers, one audience.
Step two is the administration.
When Trump named Markwayne Mullin his homeland security secretary this spring, Natelashvili greeted the appointment publicly: “a Cherokee, an experienced plumber, but unfortunately he couldn’t even find time to finish school.” Roman Gotsiridze — effectively the only opposition economist every program invites — tells the same audience that Trump’s policy is “a black day for American business,” that his strategy is “bad for the world and for Georgia, good for Russia.” Taken one at a time, each of these is legitimate criticism. Taken every evening for a year, it is a curriculum.
Step three is the party. And here the teaching becomes visible in a single case.
Last year, iFact — a Georgian investigative outlet funded repeatedly by Open Society Foundations grants — published serious reporting, first carried by Reuters. Georgia’s state oil and gas corporation wrote off an arbitration debt of 15.5 million lari, more than $5.5 million, owed by Frontera, the company of Texas oil magnate Steve Nicandros. The financial statements say plainly that there is no point in demanding the money. Nicandros then wrote to as many as 16 senators whose campaigns he had financed over the years, urging them not to advance the MEGOBARI Act — the bill sanctioning Georgian officials, whose name means “friend” in Georgian — because it would harm a future investment that, iFact concluded, does not actually exist.
iFact called the arrangement what it was: a political barter. Ivanishvili’s ruling party escaped American sanctions. The Texas company shed its liabilities and, by iFact’s own account, entities tied to its management picked up exclusive extraction rights in Kakheti. That is the story — Ivanishvili’s government buying American influence, documented by the very ecosystem the Georgian opposition trusts.
Then the same investigation went on Georgian television. On the opposition channel Formula, it opened like this: behind this process stand the personal interests of two men and a multimillion-dollar deal. Two men — a Texas oilman and Trump’s sitting cabinet secretary. The broadcast turns on those two American names. Frontera’s Georgian chief executive, the man who for years represented the company before the Georgian government, is never named on air. Frontera is instead described as “Mullin’s company.”
One investigation. Two audiences. Two lessons. In English: a barter in which Ivanishvili’s government is the buyer. In Georgian primetime: Republican senators, congressmen, and the president are corrupt.
A barter, by definition, has two sides. On air, one name is missing. It is the Georgian one.
Step four is the country. Nobody announces it. Nobody has to.
Climb the first three every evening for six years and the fourth arrives on its own — and it can be measured. In National Democratic Institute polling, Georgians name the European Union as their closest desired partner far more often than the United States: 60% to 38% in politics, 59% to 34% in the economy. Curse one Western partner every evening and hold the other up as the alternative, and the numbers move. They have moved. Half of Ivanishvili’s work was done for him, free of charge.
Meanwhile, the transactions continue quietly. A 70-story Trump Tower is planned for Tbilisi, first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The land it will stand on, according to the Georgian business press, is registered to Ivanishvili’s Cartu Foundation. One side buys American influence in silence. The other burns it in prime time.
And the MEGOBARI Act itself? It is neither dead nor blocked. It passed the House and now sits before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the Senate, “blocking” a bill is not an official act. A “hold” is an informal, unrecorded signal that nobody can produce or confirm. The bill has not been voted down. It has not been withdrawn. It runs until this Congress ends. The “finally blocked by Trump” sensation broadcast to Georgians describes a procedural event that, officially, does not exist.
That is the whole method. The lesson does not require facts. It requires repetition.
The remedy is cheap. America enters Georgia’s information space through a single filter: translations of CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Georgians learn about America almost entirely from the Americans who despise its current government. Fox News, the New York Post, and Newsmax are not translated. In Georgian, they effectively do not exist. The State Department and the embassy in Tbilisi can change that: translation, content partnerships, access.
And Washington can notice the Georgians already doing this work unpaid. When our campaign for the MEGOBARI Act began, the American flag had vanished from opposition demonstrations. At some of them, America was cursed out loud. Ia Parulava bought American flags with her own money and carried them into the street alone. The patrol police fined her 5,000 lari for handing out brochures she had printed at her own expense. A year later, the flags were back on Rustaveli, the anthem was played, and someone had carved MEGOBARI Act into a field near the Enguri in 2-meter letters.
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Georgians have not forgotten what America is worth. They are being taught to hate it — and some of the teachers are the people Washington still calls friends.
Georgians do not need to be persuaded to love America. They did that on their own, for a generation. They need only to hear it speak for itself.
America should answer. In its own voice, without interpreters.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he served as a senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work has appeared in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.