Conservatives for Putin, Explained

There are very few things, (if any), that are complicated or thought-provoking about the American right as it exists in 2022. It has been remade in the image of its emperor-god Donald Trump and pays fealty to him by adopting his personal vendettas and fits of pique. Conservatives will, of course, use the culture war, now re-branded as a war on anything perceived as “woke,” as a convenient bridge to its only other reason for being, which is to troll the libs.

Apart from more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and things like deductions for massive SUVs and private jets, that is all that’s left of American conservatism today – further marginalization of the already marginalized, trolling the libs, and doing the Donald’s bidding.

So, as we see Republicans and their dutiful propagandists praise Putin and denounce Ukraine, we must eschew any impulse to analyze this deeply and instead pay attention to the easy answers; the bleeding obvious.

This is not about democracy or geopolitics. This is Donald Trump getting revenge. In the 80s, it might have been a biting Cindy Adams column or “John Barron” calling in a tip to Page Six. Today, it more ominously involves choosing to side with the authoritarian dictator doing a Sudetenland on Ukraine. Crimea war nicht genug wasn’t enough.

You will recall that Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019, (and acquitted in January by his Republican henchmen). The subject matter of that impeachment is not just relevant to, but fully informs, American conservatives’ siding with Putin. Donald Trump is exacting his revenge upon Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not playing ball in 2019.

If there was one person to whom Trump did not want to lose the 2020 election, it was Joe Biden. Trump spent incalculable time and energy recruiting people to assist him in, essentially, making up a series of scandals accusing Biden of corruption in Ukraine for two reasons: 1. wielding the power of the right-wing echo chamber and lazy Washington reporters, it could put a question in voters’ minds about whether Biden was a corrupt gonif and sell-out; and 2. get payback for the exposure of the 2018 Trump campaign’s oddly incestuous relationship with certain Middle Eastern emirates and actors associated with the Russian Federation. What better way to prove the “Russia hoax” than to gin up a Ukrainian one?

In July 2019, on a phone call with Zelensky, Trump attempted to coerce his Ukrainian counterpart to spread lies accusing Biden and his son, Hunter, of various corrupt misdeeds. Trump told Zelensky that he would block the payment of a $400 million package of Congressionally appropriated military aid unless Zelensky played ball.

(Lt. Col. (Ret.) Alexander Vindman, then Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, was on the call and was so alarmed that he blew the whistle on the whole thing – this corrupt attempt by Trump to abuse his power by coercing the Ukrainian President to interfere in an American election through a quid pro quo.)

According to the resolution by the House Intelligence Committee,

[T]he impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection. In furtherance of this scheme, President Trump conditioned official acts on a public announcement by the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, of politically-motivated investigations, including one into President Trump’s domestic political opponent. In pressuring President Zelensky to carry out his demand, President Trump withheld a White House meeting desperately sought by the Ukrainian President, and critical U.S. military assistance to fight Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine

House Intelligence Committee Report

In the end, Trump could not rely on the Ukrainian government to legitimize his corrupt scheme. He was left instead to commission his dutiful personal propagandists to attempt to manufacture the “scandal” through vanity publishers and right-wing cable “news” outlets.

But that is it – the whole explanation for the conservative backing of Putin’s slow-rolling Anschluss of Ukraine is that they are in thrall to Trump, and Trump prefers Putin to Zelensky because Putin knows better how to play to Trump’s myriad weaknesses, and Trump perceives that as respect.

It is all to be rejected and condemned by normal patriotic Americans. We support even the flawed, nascent, unstable democracies.

Just as surely as we would have rejected Lindbergh or the Bund in the 1930s, we reject the Putinist fifth column today.