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.”
It’s not. Nor has it ever been. Russia attacked Ukraine because Putin has territorial ambitions and nothing more. Putin proved way back in 2008, during the brief Russo-Georgian War, that he’s willing to invade other nations on false pretenses. When he attacked Georgia and quickly took over some of that nation’s lands, the world collectively shrugged, giving the (real) dictator the green light to do it again in Crimea in 2014. Interestingly enough, when he was asked about Crimea shortly before that invasion – in 2013 – Putin claimed that the situation there was completely different than in Georgia because there had been no declaration of an independent nation – right before he orchestrated one in order to invade. Then, in 2022, using lies about Nazi leaders and yellow journalism to accuse Ukraine of atrocities, he justified yet another invasion. Last year, in his State of the Nation address, Putin rewrote history to justify that act, blaming the West for provoking the war. Yet the Trump administration is bending over backwards not to blame Putin.
We have to ask ourselves: Why is the Trump administration so unwilling to acknowledge basic truths in order to accommodate the world’s most lethal villain?
Well, part of the answer may be found in Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday. The two key lines that seemed to go largely unnoticed were:
“We didn’t give [the Panama Canal] to China; we gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”
“And I think we’re going to get [Greenland] — one way or the other, we’re going to get it.”
The first line seems right out of Putin’s playbook, laying the foundation that the United States was somehow cheated and may have no choice but to take land and resources away from a foreign nation. Putin argued that Crimea had to be taken back because he too understands how to tap into people’s anger. The notion of “taking back” is a strong one – think, for instance, how slogans about taking back the UK caused it to leave the EU.
Like Trump’s arguments about Greenland, Putin has also claimed that annexing certain territories – including Ukraine – is necessary for Russian security and world security, declaring that “enduring international order is possible without a strong and sovereign Russia.”
Trump is using the same logic: Whatever makes the United States stronger is better for the world, and if we have to invade certain places to make that happen, we may just do that. If we turn Gaza into an American Riviera, it’s all for the better, Trump argues, even if it comes at the cost of thousands of Palestinian lives and the utter destruction of Palestinian culture.
It’s difficult, then, for Trump to criticize Putin’s rationales for invasion when he’s using similar rationales himself. Trump is building a monument of grievance so that he can use it to justify any actions he may take.
The US has done such things before, of course. We provoked the Mexican War, but found an excuse to say it was the Mexicans – then took about a third of their country away. (Now Trump is provoking a trade war on the same grounds, blaming for Mexico somehow starting it.) We found similar justifications for taking Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. We also justified, in one way or another, all of our violations against Native American tribes.
Everyone in their right mind should be questioning Trump’s motives, yet questioning is also something Trump is trying to get rid of, once again emulating Putin. The Russian dictator has cracked down on dissidents, removed all in the government he deems disloyal, and has infiltrated universities to make sure they’re teaching an ideology that suits his needs. Sound familiar? In her takeover of the GOP leadership, Lara Trump insisted that all members of the GOP refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the 2020 election; Trump and Musk have sent their DOGE minions to weed out any potential dissent within the government; Trump took over programming at the Kennedy Center, to stop it from being too “woke”; and Trump has been threatening to withhold funding from universities that do things he doesn’t like, such as DEI initiatives, and has now started sending in task forces to ensure that the speech of students is thoroughly regulated. Recently, Barnard College expelled students it said had taken their free speech too far because they had committed crimes – however nonviolent – in the process of exercising it. Once again, justifications that meet a predetermined end.
Insist that territorial expansions are about security, demand loyalty, crush dissent, and make up the facts as you go. Of course Trump won’t criticize Putin: they’re both reading from the same script.
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