Donald Trump’s affinity for his pal Vladimir Putin has now torpedoed new congressionally mandated sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. How low will Trump stoop to aid Putin?
The trade restrictions that Trump lifted were named after Sen. Lindsey Graham, which passed with huge bipartisan support after Graham suddenly died this summer. But Trump used his authority to undermine the sanctions, ostensibly claiming to keep peace talks going. It’s clear that this isn’t about negotiation so much as helping his bud Putin secure a victory over Kyiv.
Indeed, Trump is pushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to make a deal that seems a lot like outright capitulation, right after Starlink’s military grade Starshield has intermittently gone down in Ukraine in recent days, leaving it more vulnerable for attack as U.S. intelligence allegedly curtailed information-sharing. Trump and his erstwhile ally Elon Musk have pointed the finger at each other for who’s responsible, and frankly either or both could be lying.
And, of course, there is evidence that Russia is again trying to meddle in the U.S. midterm elections.
None of this is a surprise. Trump has never, ever understood or really cared about the realities for Ukraine in this conflict. He demonstrated that clearly enough even before this full-scale invasion even started, when he dangled cutting off U.S. military assistance to Kyiv as a threat to try to force Zelenskyy to investigate the family of Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, after Putin had already annexed the Crimea region. That was the “perfect phone call” for which he was impeached over.
Not much has changed and fast forward seven years and Trump is not only more out of control than ever, but he has completely subsumed the rest of the GOP into his fanatical movement, and is now undermining their goal of international security.
No amount of time atop the highest echelon of executive power has been able to convey to Trump the true stakes of his position and international diplomacy, nor to shake him out of seeing everything through the filter of the New York real estate world.
Everything to him is a deal, a deal in which he has to get his and the particulars are secondary. It is the guiding principle of all of his domestic and foreign policy goals, from the tariff obsession — which stems from a sophomoric understanding of international trade in which the U.S. must “win” by having a positive trade balance with every country in the world — to FEMA’s disaster relief work to the Russia invasion.
He does not and cannot grasp the long-term consequences of a Russian victory in Ukraine, ranging from the sheer humanitarian disaster that would unfold on the ground to the threat to the rest of Europe, full of our own putative allies, and eventually to the U.S. itself.
The only thing Trump sees is that Putin is a “strong” leader — so because he terrorizes his domestic population, crushes political opposition, and sends many men to die in the name of his imperial ambitions — and that he could buy some of its gas to ease the self-inflicted political crisis of high prices at home, Ukraine, its people, and our allies be damned.