Amid widespread condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump cut a lone voice back in February when he described the Russian leader’s tactics as “smart”.
Addressing Republican activists and donors at the Conservative Political Action Conference just two days after the invasion began, the former US president argued that while Putin’s unprovoked incursion was an “atrocity”, the White House was “dumb” for allowing Joe Biden to be played “like a drum”.
During his own tenure in the Oval Office, Trump “turned Putin into a popular figure among a significant segment of Republican voters”, said The New York Times’ David Leonhardt. A YouGov poll for Yahoo! News in January found that overall, GOP voters viewed Putin more favourably than Biden, Kamala Harris or Nancy Pelosi.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
But now, as Trump refuses to rule out a second run at the White House in 2024, some analysts are predicting that he could pay a high price for supporting his Russian former counterpart.
Mixed messaging
Following Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Trump “took Russia’s side” in the shadow conflict, said CNN reporter Marshall Cohen. During an interview with ABC News, Trump claimed that the Crimean people “would rather be with Russia”.
He also has a “mixed record on arming Ukraine”, CNN’s Cohen continued. In 2019, the then US president “infamously withheld nearly $400m in military aid” in an effort to “pressure” Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy into revealing “sham corruption investigations into Biden and his family’s business dealings”.
The weapons in “the stalled aid package” included surface-to-air Javelin missiles that have “emerged as a crucial part of Ukraine’s surprisingly robust defences against Russian tanks”, Cohen wrote.
In the run-up to Putin’s invasion earlier this year, Trump “praised Putin for recognising Ukraine’s economic and strategic value to Russia”, reported The New York Times’ Leonhardt. But more recently, Trump has “shifted to a more mixed message”, arguing that the Russian president should “negotiate a peace agreement” while still “praising him”.
Trump appears to have realised that the invasion had “changed the situation” at home, “damaging Putin’s popularity in the US, even among Republicans”, Leonhardt continued. Most GOP backers “wish the Biden administration would take more aggressive action to help Ukraine”.
“Yet Trump’s effect on Putin’s popularity has not entirely disappeared: there is still a meaningful faction of Republican elites who feel an affinity for the Russian president,” he added.
Among Trump’s voter base, opinion is “splintered” over the war in Ukraine, according to NBC News. In “conversations with Trump voters”, the broadcaster reported, “the spectrum of thinking ran from giving Putin free rein, on one end, to sending in US troops”.
All of which may help to “explain the inconsistency” of the former president’s message when US-allied “Western democracies have united to condemn Putin”.
Re-election hopes
Trump “will pay for praising” the Russian president, said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institute.
In an opinion piece for the Chatham House think tank, Kamarch argued that “cracks” were emerging in Trump’s base even before the invasion, as it became increasingly “clear that an anti-Trump faction was forming within the Republican Party”.
And “as the atrocities in Ukraine mount”, she wrote, “more and more Republicans are distancing themselves from Trump’s fondness for Putin”.
These divisions have fuelled speculation about how the war will impact Trump’s popularity and his potential ambitions for another run at the presidency.
The Financial Times’ associate editor Janan Ganesh predicted that despite such tensions, this is not “the end” for the former president. Although “liberals are right to bring up his past flirtations with the Kremlin”, Trump’s critics “overrate the harm it will do to his electoral viability”.
Trump’s interventions have “always been a dog’s breakfast of contradictions”, wrote Ganesh, pointing to his “praise for tyrants, but also a sense of macho competition with them”. And the war has also given Trump new “lines of attack” against Biden.
If the Ukraine crisis “drags on”, it could be “reframed as less a case of Biden’s sure touch than of American helplessness and Russian impunity”. Ganesh continued. In that event, “a country that tires of Biden the careful diplomat will pine for a leader who ‘might do anything’”.
“Counterfactuals always involve guessing,” wrote political pundit Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine. But “if Trump had secured a second term in office, Ukraine would be losing the war right now”.
Kyiv’s resistance has depended on “a unified and energetic response from its Western allies”, including “moral solidarity, economic sanctions, intelligence sharing, and a massive infusion of weapons”. With Trump in the Oval Office, “none of these would be occurring”.
But “Russia hawks within the Republican Party” have still “tried to cast Trump as the true Russia hawk”, turning his “obsessive attacks on Nato into evidence he was cleverly trying to strengthen the alliance all along”, Chait added.
YouGov polling for The Economist in February found that about 80% of both Democrats and Republicans sided with Ukraine over Russia in this conflict.
But no conclusive data is yet available on whether Trump’s claim that Russia would never have invaded with him in the White House rings true with Republican voters.
