To accurately measure MAGA, use a Russian ruler
The Democrats must confront Trump's Putin-inspired foreign policy as part of defending democracy at home
Last week, I wrote about the Trump administration’s efforts to pivot the United States to actively oppose fellow democracies and join forces with a broad range of illiberal, even openly anti-American actors. Central to dreams of authoritarian transformation on the world stage is Trump’s deep devotion to Russian foreign policy goals and to Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin. Indeed, even the administration’s efforts to build ties to far-right European parties echo Russian moves, as that country has long seen such extremist parties as a way to break apart European democracy and unity, so that what might seem to be measures having no direct relation to coddling Russia in fact end up being more of the same.
As the Washington Post reports, Vice President’s JD Vance’s deeply troubling speech to European leaders in mid-February — in which he went to bat for Germany’s neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party and told his listeners that “the enemy within” was a greater threat than a potential Russian invasion — echoed in major ways comments that Putin himself has made. Putin’s regime has long enforced a deeply conservative social vision on the country, with the Russian dictator presenting Russia as a sort of Slavic bulwark against “woke” forces that are destroying Western nations, and that would destroy Russia if left unchecked. That is, Vance essentially echoed Russian propaganda as he unloaded MAGA-tinged fusillades of accusation and lies against his aghast European colleagues.
Yet, the twist in the story is that Vance was also reflecting the degree to which MAGA beliefs have cross-pollinated with, and borrowed from, contemporary Russian ideology. In an excellent in-depth report on modern Russian society, the Washington Post observes that, “Over time, people in Trump’s MAGA movement have grown to see Putin as a standard-bearer for the anti-woke crusade now spearheaded by Trump and adviser Elon Musk.” And in turn, Putin has encouraged the idea that he is a latter-day defender of Western values — values that, curiously enough, exclude anything that involves freedom, equality, solidarity, accountability, or basic respect for human life and dignity. In other words, even as Donald Trump is forging an autocrat-to-autocrat connection with Putin, in which the goals seems to be to carve up the world into spheres of influence between Russia and the U.S., the broader MAGA movement has a separate set of incentives and shared beliefs binding MAGA to that country.
But as even a cursory study of the state of modern Russia makes clear, the idea that any American would look to that land as a source of inspiration is chilling, if not deranged. Contemporary Russia is a totalitarian state, in which schoolchildren are inculcated with propaganda, LGBTQ people are criminalized, feminism is punished, democracy non-existent, and cult-like worship of a maximum leader strongly encouraged. Russia, in point of fact, is in many ways the antithesis of what most Americans want for their own country.
I’d wager that the love affair between MAGA and modern Russian fascistic ideologues isn’t common knowledge among the American electorate — yet these connections are highly illuminating of MAGA’s true nature. Rather than representing the aspirations of some vast American middle, MAGA represents the perversion and destruction of the freedoms, possibilities, and slow but steady social progress that help form the soul of the United States. To dream of making America into a cultural and political wasteland like Russia is to dream of America’s destruction, not of its greatness. And MAGA's Russian dreaming helps drive home a point that we all need to internalize — that there is no endpoint at which the reactionary impulse behind MAGA will ever be satisfied. The logic that drives it — misogynistic, white supremacist, Christian nationalist, exploitative — is also very much anti-human and anti-democracy, denying our basic impulses towards collective freedom, self-expression, and self-determination. In this, we should also note that is deeply unstable, requiring the suppression of dissent in order to grow and maintain its power.
With this bit of context about Russian-MAGA ties outlined, let’s return to the world of geopolitical maneuvering. Donald Trump’s lie last week that Ukraine, not Russia, is responsible for starting the war between those two countries marked the latest appalling low point of Trump’s identification with Russian interests: an echoing of Putinist propaganda that holds that Ukraine is the aggressor, and Russia merely defending itself, an absurd proposition that asks us to ignore the evidence of our own eyes and the incontestable fact that Russian invaded Ukraine, not the other way around. Accompanied by Trump’s frenzied rhetorical attacks against Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator” (again, echoing Russian propaganda) and claims that Zelensky tricked the U.S. into helping it, Trump’s lies were a bridge too far even for some Republicans, at least those who still hold on to the vestigial belief that the GOP stands against Russian expansionism. Not surprisingly, though, most didn’t object to Trump’s latest contribution to Putin’s cause.
In this head-in-the-sand phenomenon, though, there’s some potential for Democrats to exploit these tensions between them and Trump. In a best-case scenario, even if many Republicans aren’t comfortable speaking out now, that could change in the face of fallout born of Trump’s devotion to Russia’s priorities. As Brian Beutler suggests in a conversation with Greg Sargent on a recent episode of the Daily Blast podcast, Democrats should at a minimum make clear that they will hold the GOP accountable for any downside that flows from Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine — but should also hold open the door to common cause with GOP senators and representatives for whom future disaster might not be worth offering Trump their unconditional support.
Beutler also recommends that Democrats make a public assertion that the party will work to re-align U.S. foreign policy against Russia when they once again have power, as a signal to Putin and also “If only for their own sense of self-dignity and pride, and then having something to feel like they’re rallying toward as opposed to always being on the hind foot in fights against Republicans.” But I’d add that such assertions aren’t just necessary as aspirational markers — they are also opportunities to articulate why, exactly, the United States is so badly served by making common cause with dictators who hate America, and how Americans’ lives would be concretely affected if we were to live in a world without fellow democracies as allies. I think this stance leads directly to the need for Democrats under Trump II to be much more vocal about challenging, and providing an alternative to, Trump’s autocrat-loving, transactional, and self-dealing foreign policy.
In fact, apart from the need to speak up vigorously in defense of Ukraine as a general proposition, there’s a perfect opportunity right now to excoriate Trump and articulate an alternative vision for America in the world. The president’s efforts to extort massive amounts of Ukraine’s mineral wealth — as much as half a trillion dollars — in exchange for nothing, but merely as payback for the support the U.S. has so far lent that country, is so depraved as to almost defy belief (reports today that the two countries have struck such a deal leave me skeptical that any credible U.S. security guaranties are actually being proferred). As historian Timothy Synder puts it, “This is not really a monetary proposition, let alone a "deal," but rather the demand that Ukraine become a permanent American colony.” The idea that the United States would shake down a country that has lost tens of thousands of people defending against Russian expansionism, declaring that the country has somehow trespassed against the United States by accepting money and arms a previous administration provided it, goes far beyond cynicism, into more or less open complicity with Russia’s attempts to conquer and dismember Ukraine.
Indeed, Trump’s attitude that Ukraine is not a country to defend, but a geographic locale to loot, is an echo of Putin’s own attitude towards that country. It is a deal that, if Ukraine accepts it, would rob that country of much of its wealth, while marking the United States as a predatory and unreliable ally — a lesson that would be instantly apparent to our remaining allies around the globe.
I do have some sympathy for Democrats who want to pick their battles with Trump, and not get overwhelmed trying to fight on too many fronts. Prioritization is important! But I don’t have sympathy with the idea that Democrats should therefore sidebar foreign policy conflicts as secondary matters because they supposedly don’t command public interest or are less pressing to voters than, say, high food prices. How the United States behaves in the world, and how we talk about it, has a direct and major bearing on our collective national character — and on our domestic politics. By selling out and exploiting Ukraine, Donald Trump is trying to conscript our collective national power into dastardly, self-defeating ends that say something very important about what sort of people we are — and how others will see us. Trump’s conceit, in the most charitable reading, is that the United States should plunder other countries to build our wealth. But this is merely the foreign policy face of a fascistic domestic politics. The U.S.’s actions in the world would be reduced to a mere extension of the will of its authoritarian leader, heedless of any issues he deems irrelevant, be it human rights, the defense of democracy, or mutually beneficial trade.
More than this, though — such exploitative policies on the world stage also reinforce Trump’s fascistic politics at home. They serve as a reward to the public for accepting his authoritarian rule — in exchange for subordinating ourselves to his power, he will make us powerful in the world. In exchange for accepting diminished economic expectations, we will still make money by ripping off other countries. And they bind us closer to him by making us all complicit in the commission of horrors abroad, reinforcing the idea that the only lives we should consider fully human are those of Americans. While these may seem like abstract points difficult to convey in concrete, everyday terms to the average American, Democrats should not ignore their reality, and the damage Trump’s authoritarian foreign policy can do to the prospects of democracy at home.