Christian Nationalists

Trump: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 2, 2025

On February 28, the same day that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin against Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Martin Matishak of The Record, a cybersecurity news publication, broke the story that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stop all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.

Both the scope of the directive and its duration are unclear.

On Face the Nation this morning, Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine, contradicted that information. “Considering what I know, what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would I’m certain not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States operations,” he said. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, Turner was in line to be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in this Congress until House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) removed him from that slot and from the intelligence committee altogether.

And yet, as Stephanie Kirchgaessner of The Guardian notes, the Trump administration has made clear that it no longer sees Russia as a cybersecurity threat. Last week, at a United Nations working group on cybersecurity, representatives from the European Union and the United Kingdom highlighted threats from Russia, while Liesyl Franz, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity, did not mention Russia, saying the U.S. was concerned about threats from China and Iran.

Kirchgaessner also noted that under Trump, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors cyberthreats against critical infrastructure, has set new priorities. Although Russian threats, especially those against U.S. election systems, were a top priority for the agency in the past, a source told Kirchgaessner that analysts were told not to follow or report on Russian threats.

“Russia and China are ourbiggest adversaries,” the source told Kirchgaessner. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.” “People are saying Russia is winning,” the source said. “Putin is on the inside now.”

Another source noted that “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.” “Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat, the person added. Under those circumstances, the source said, ceasing to follow and report Russian threats is “truly shocking.”

Trump’s outburst in the Oval Office on Friday confirmed that Putin has been his partner in politics since at least 2016. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.”

Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.

Trump has made dismissing as a hoax what he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia” central to his political narrative. But Russian operatives did, in fact, work to elect him in 2016. A 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that Putin ordered hacks of Democratic computer networks, and at two crucial moments WikiLeaks, which the Senate committee concluded was allied with the Russians, dumped illegally obtained emails that were intended to hurt the candidacy of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump openly called for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.

Russian operatives also flooded social media with disinformation, not necessarily explicitly endorsing Trump, but spreading lies about Clinton to depress Democratic turnout, or to rile up those on the right by falsely claiming that Democrats intended to ban the Pledge of Allegiance, for example. The goal of the propaganda was not simply to elect Trump. It was to pit the far ends of the political spectrum against the middle, tearing the nation apart.

Fake accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook drove wedges between Americans over issues of race, immigration, and gun rights. Craig Timberg and Tony Romm of the Washington Post reported in 2018 that Facebook officials told Congress that the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram.

That effort was not a one-shot deal: Russians worked to influence the 2020 presidential election, too. In 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that Putin “authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President [Joe] Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical division in the US.” But “[u]nlike in 2016,” the report said, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure.”

Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded.

In October 2024, Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, warned in an interview with CBS News that Russia was bombarding voters with propaganda to divide Americans before that year’s election, as well. Operatives were not just posting fake stories and replying to posts, but were also using AI to manufacture fake videos and laundering Russian talking points through social media influencers. Just a month before, news had broken that Russia was funding Tenet Media, a company that hired right-wing personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, and Matt Christiansen, who repeated Russian talking points.

Now back in office, Trump and MAGA loyalists say that efforts to stop disinformation undermine their right to free speech. Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the second Trump administration, denied that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election—calling it “a Clinton campaign dirty trick”—and called for ending government efforts to stop disinformation with “utmost urgency.” “The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth,” it said.

On February 20, Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barnes, and Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is firing or reassigning officials at the FBI and CISA who had worked on protecting elections. That includes those trying to stop foreign propaganda and disinformation and those combating cyberattacks and attempts to disrupt voting systems.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story that two members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” are now installed at CISA: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls,” and Kyle Schutt, a 38-year-old software engineer. Kim Zetter of Wired reported that since 2018, CISA has “helped state and local election offices around the country assess vulnerabilities in their networks and help secure them.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that he would end the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the election, a newspaper reporter asked Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Putin, if Trump’s election would mean “positive changes from Russia’s point of view.” Patrushev answered: “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”

“America has turned.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 24, 2025

Three years ago today, a massive influx of Russian troops crossed into Ukraine to join the troops that had been there since the 2014 invasion. At the time, it seemed that Russian president Vladimir Putin thought victory would be a matter of days, and observers did not think he was wrong. But Ukraine government officials pointedly filmed themselves in Kyiv, and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave. Rejecting the U.S. offer of evacuation, Zelensky replied: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”

For the past three years Ukraine has held off Russia. As Anne Applebaum noted today in The Atlantic, civilian society in Ukraine has volunteered for the war effort, and the defense industry has transformed to produce both hardware and software to hit Russian targets: indeed, Ukraine now leads the world in AI-enabled drone technology. The Ukraine army has become the largest in Europe, with a million people. Ukraine has suffered attacks on civilians, hospitals, and the energy sector, and at least 46,000 soldiers have died, with another 380,000 wounded.

At the same time, Russia’s economy is crumbling as its military production takes from the civilian economy and sanctions prevent other countries from taking up the slack. Inflation is through the roof, and more than 700,000 of those fighting for Russia have been killed or wounded. Applebaum notes that the Institute for the Study of War estimates that at the rate it’s moving, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine.

“The only way Putin wins now,” Applebaum writes, “is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.” And this appears to be the plan afoot, as U.S. president Donald Trump has directed U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, to negotiate an end to the war with Russian officials. Neither Ukrainian nor European leaders were invited to the talks that took place last Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Three years ago, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were key to rallying allies and partners to stand against the invasion, providing war materiel, humanitarian aid, money, and crucial economic sanctions against Russia that began the process of dismantling the Russian economy. Today, Ukraine hosted European leaders, but U.S. officials did not attend.

In the past week, President Donald Trump has embraced Russian propaganda about its invasion. Trump blamed Ukraine for the war that Russia began by invading, called Zelensky a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime (Russia hopes that it will be able to sway new elections, but Ukraine’s laws bar wartime elections), and lied that the U.S. has provided $350 billion to Ukraine and that half the money is “missing.” In fact, the U.S. has provided about $100 billion, which is less than Europe has contributed, and the U.S. contributions have been mostly in the form of weapons from U.S. stockpiles that defense industries then replaced at home. None of that support is “missing.”

As Peter Baker of the New York Times points out, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said: “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Baker’s piece explored how “in Trump’s alternate reality, lies and distortions” will make it easier for Trump to give Putin everything he wants in a peace agreement. For his part, Putin on Saturday launched 267 drones into Ukraine, the largest drone attack of the war.

Today, just a month into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated that one nation must not invade another, one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, an organization whose headquarters are actually in the United States. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which passed overwhelmingly. China and India abstained.

On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”

The editorial board of London’s Financial Times noted today that “[i]n the past ten days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership.” Instead, it has become an “unabashed predator,” allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries. The board recalled important moments in which “the US displayed its character as global leader,” and those moments “defined the world’s idea of America.” But a new era has begun. Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “should have never started” the war with Russia, and J.D. Vance’s statement that the real danger in Europe is liberal democracy, are “the dark version of those” moments coming, as they did, “straight from Putin’s talking points.”

Each, the board said, “will live in infamy.” It added that “there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure.” He is “instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want…. He divides the world into spheres of interest.”

“America,” the board concluded, “has turned.”

It appears Putin thought that breaking the U.S. away from Europe would leave Europe weak and adrift, especially with Germany about to hold elections that Russia hoped Germany’s far-right, pro-Russian party would win and with both Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance having demonstrated their support. But French president Emmanuel Macron, a staunch backer of Ukraine, appears to be stepping into the vacuum caused by the loss of the United States. After the U.S.’s reorientation became clear at the Munich Security Conference on February 14–16, Macron invited European leaders to Paris to discuss the U.S. change.

On Monday, February 17, eight European leaders and the heads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union met; on Wednesday, Macron spoke with the leaders of 19 countries, including Canada, either in person or over videoconferencing. Leaders from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden also joined the conversation.

The far-right German party made gains in yesterday’s election but did not win. Instead, the center-right party won and will form a government with the outgoing center-left party. The incoming party strongly supports Ukraine.

“I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this,” Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said yesterday, but “it is clear that [Trump’s] government does not care much about the fate of Europe.” He said that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”

Yesterday the European Union imposed more sanctions on Russia. Today the United Kingdom announced a sweeping package of sanctions rivaling those of the war’s early days. They include sanctions against companies in various countries that supply components like tools, electronics, and microprocessors for Russian munitions. The sanctions also include Russian oligarchs, ships transporting Russian oil, and North Korea’s defense minister No Kwang Chol, whom the U.K. holds responsible for deploying North Korean soldiers to help Russia.

Today, Macron visited Trump at the White House, where the visit got off to a poor start when Trump broke protocol by neglecting to greet Macron when he arrived. During the visit, the two men took questions from the press. Macron maintained a facade of camaraderie with Trump, but as Trump slumped in his chair and recited the inaccuracies that in the U.S. often go uncorrected, Macron seemed comfortable and in command. He interrupted Trump to contradict him in front of reporters and called out Russia for being the aggressor in the war.

John Simpson of the BBC noted that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change” and that 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”

Be clear about what’s happening: Trump is siding with Putin

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 19, 2025

The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.

A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.

Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine would get back all its land—essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea, at least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949.

Hegseth’s biggest concession to Russia, though, was his warning that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

In a press conference on Thursday, the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the U.S. military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena and was choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world’s most powerful military found ludicrous.

Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.

While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

Talks began yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a four-and-a half-hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and including national security advisor Mike Waltz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to restaff the embassies in each other’s countries, a key Russian goal as part of its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for previous “obstacles” to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that Trump is in power, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”

Yesterday evening, from his Florida residence, Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating, when in fact it is about 57%.

Today, Trump posted that Zelensky is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rozen pointed out in Diplomatic, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.”

“Be clear about what’s happening,” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted. “Trump and his administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a United States ally.”

To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.

The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all.

The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.

In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.

To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.

Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.

Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.

But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.

When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.

When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.

Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”

This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.” Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine.

In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes: nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.

“And we are negotiating with them,” Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.

For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones.

For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”

The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war” but which side is America now on?

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 16, 2025

The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.

At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.

Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation’s people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.

Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.

After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.

After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”

Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It’s heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It’s horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”

Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”

Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.

Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.

Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.

Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.

In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.

On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.

On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.

After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”

European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.

After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.