Why does Trump want to help Putin conquer Ukraine?
Democrats should not underestimate the moral abomination of the president joining forces with an expansionist Russia, or their capacity to rally Americans against his complicity
Even as the government of Ukraine has agreed to a tentative cease-fire deal in the last few days (so long as the Russians agree as well, which as of this writing remains to be seen), we should continue to view the motives of the White House and its commitment to a fair peace between the two warring countries with extreme skepticism. As we’ll discuss further below, the Trump administration has moved the U.S. from broad support of the Ukrainian war effort to actively undermining it. An examination of recent events, particularly the meeting earlier this month between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Trump, shows that even a temporary halt to fighting brokered by the U.S. would not be a sign that Trump is suddenly on Ukraine’s side, given the various ways he has already tried to advantage Team Putin.
Perhaps most prominently, the Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy a week and a half ago was a true disaster: it undercut a democratic ally, advanced Russian objectives, and generally telegraphed an irredeemably dark direction for the president’s foreign policy, in which the U.S. is to be aligned with bloody authoritarians like Vladimir Putin. Given the administration’s efforts prior to the meeting to echo Russian propaganda and suggest an impossibly high price for Ukraine to pay in exchange for dubious U.S. support, the meeting was a clearly orchestrated ambush of Zelensky. And events since then have confirmed a key purpose behind the betrayal: to provide a pretext for the United States to openly shift its support to Russia in the ongoing war against Ukraine, with the Trump administration halting military supplies and intelligence to that country.
In the Oval Office, Trump and Vice President JD Vance echoed Kremlin talking points, with Trump accusing Ukraine of wanting to start “World War III” and complaining that peace was not possible because Zelenskyy hates Putin so much — as if the Ukrainian president suffers from an inexplicable psychological condition. But it’s VP Vance who may have uttered the most reprehensible and Putinphilic line, when he essentially taunted Zelenskyy about running low on troops — a sadistic nod to how many Ukrainian soldiers have been killed by the Russian invasion, as if Vance were blaming the Ukrainian president and not Putin for their deaths. Vance (now infamously) also berated Zelenskyy for not thanking America for its contributions to Ukraine — an outright lie, but one that curried favor with Trump while broadcasting self-serving administration propaganda to the MAGA faithful that the president was protecting the country from an ungrateful mooch.
Yet, for all the shame that Trump and Vance brought on themselves and on our nation that day, there was also a useful clarity in the ambush — a point well made by David Frum:
Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular [. . .] [The] meeting gave the lie to any claim that this administration’s policy is driven by any strategic effort to advance the interests of the United States, however misguided.
Both the president and vice president showed the U.S.-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America’s allies—and who deeply sympathize with the world’s most aggressive dictator.
Meanwhile, at Talking Points Memo, reporter Josh Kovensky called out the grievance politics that Trump and Vance foregrounded in the meeting, with so much of their rage against Zelensky wrapped up with presenting the U.S., not Ukraine, as the real victim — a deeply perverse distortion of a war that has claimed tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives. But Kovensky’s suggestion as to the source of this grievance is striking: he notes that Trump and MAGA are angry at Ukraine and its president because Ukraine has, over the last three years, demonstrated what real strength looks like:
The Ukrainians are quite literally sacrificing themselves in order to live in a democratic society. They’re laying down their lives to defend their sovereignty, but also to defend the same values that, we constantly hear from the far-right and the far-left, are naive and foolish: that it’s possible to work for a common good, and that the old values that held up the U.S. – and the West more broadly – are still worth fighting for.
In that sense, their strength itself is the affront: the insult to Trump isn’t anything Zelensky said; it’s that he won’t capitulate.
From complementary perspectives, Frum and Kovensky convey the enormous stakes of the Ukraine conflict for the U.S.: the war is exposing how Trump and MAGA have no loyalty to democratic allies and our alliances with them, while also reminding us that democracy must sometimes be defended by literal force of arms and dedication to a common purpose.
But I think that together, they also point us towards a critical point that’s been deeply obscured in discussion of Ukraine and our NATO commitments, both by Trump’s bad faith and by the Democrats’ reluctance to spend too much political capital talking about foreign affairs. Trump and his MAGA allies have been insisting for years on a view of the world in which our relations with Europeans should be viewed entirely in economic terms, where the Europeans are to be viewed both as parasites (via insufficient military spending compared to the U.S.) and adversaries (due to purported economic exploitation of the U.S. via unfair trade practices). And though it is not a NATO member, Trump’s recent claims that Ukraine owes the U.S. for the money it has committed to that country (leading to neo-colonial proposals regarding access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth) may represent the most extreme example of this logic: Trump is essentially saying that the U.S. has never had a stake in helping Ukraine fight off Russia, and that any support of that country should be seen as a profit-making enterprise for the U.S.
From this economic-forward perspective, the NATO military alliance actually has no apparent purpose. To Trump and company, NATO is simply a way for the United States to feel aggrieved that it’s spending money to protect countries when they’re not spending enough to protect themselves.
But this perspective requires ignoring a huge chunk of glaring reality: that the role of NATO in protecting its members has, over the last several years, become not at all abstract or purposeless. Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and clear intentions to re-claim its holdings and sphere of influence from Soviet times, NATO’s primary current role is to protect its members against the very real threat of an attack by Russia.
Now, it should not be a controversial idea to say that the United States arguably has an interest in ensuring that Europe is not consumed by war as Russia rampages through the Baltic states, Poland, and other U.S. allies. Even from the economics-only view of the Trumpists, war beyond Ukraine on the European continent would be deeply destabilizing to the world economy, with long-term impacts including the loss of trading partners who, contrary to MAGA’s nonsense economics, actually help the American economy prosper. Even in a less apocalyptic scenario, where Russia gains influence over current U.S. allies via a combination of military intimidation and other means (such as by continued funding of anti-democratic, pro-Russia political parties), the U.S. would likewise be hurt economically, as those countries re-oriented their trade with Russia. And again, this is putting aside the many, many other credible reasons for deterring Russian aggression, such as preventing massive loss of life and protecting democracy.
Yet the extremely basic truism I’ve just outlined — that even at the most blinkered, economics-focused level, a Europe ravaged by war and its fallout due to Russian aggression would be bad for the United States — is completely absent from Trump’s attitude towards Ukraine and NATO more generally. At this point, Trump has in fact openly placed the U.S. on the side of Russia, providing excuses for Putin as his armed forces pummeled Ukraine in recent days, and more consequentially by halting the provision of military supplies and intelligence to that beleaguered nation (a halt that has been temporarily lifted in light of the cease-fire maneuvers).
But apart from the inherent moral abomination of siding with a murderous, authoritarian regime that launched an unprovoked attack to conquer its neighbor, you don’t need a Ph.D. in foreign affairs to see how Russia’s victory in Ukraine makes it far likelier that Russia would then target other U.S. allies. And yet the Trump team is silent on this point, as if the erasure of the democratic Europe and economic powerhouse that the U.S. made possible through its involvement in World War II and the Cold War were a mere trifle. The logical conclusion to draw is that they have no real grasp on the volatile and self-destructive game they are playing by coddling Russia and abandoning our allies. There is no sense that violence is bad, that chaos is bad, that destabilizing Europe is bad.
Unfortunately, the prospect of violent Russian expansion has also been badly neglected in Democratic rhetoric, even when that party’s elected officials push back against Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine (there are a few recent and hopeful exceptions that I will get to shortly). There is still far too much focus on talking about NATO and protecting our allies in some abstract sense (with far too little time spent explaining what NATO is and why it was created to begin with), and far too little on speaking in concrete, realistic terms about why Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and intended abandonment of European allies is a big fucking deal for ordinary Americans: because it would likely set the stage for Russia invading countries such as Poland, destabilizing the world economy, and leading to all manner of geopolitical mayhem across the globe.
I can sympathize somewhat with Democrats wanting to prioritize talking about domestic issues over criticizing Trump about foreign affairs. The former seems more concrete and front of mind for voters, the latter abstract and an afterthought for most. But the point I am trying to make here is that, in the case of Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and the implications it has for his apparent plans to abandon our NATO allies as well, we are not talking about anything that’s overly abstract. There is currently a war going on in Europe, the largest on the continent since World War II, and if it goes in Russia’s favor, then that war will mean further war in Europe. It should not be a hard political lift for Democratic elected officials to say that they want to prevent a larger war in Europe, a possibility that Trump in his slavish adulation of Vladimir Putin seems completely indifferent to. And for a party that some members are urging to embrace patriotism more overtly, it’s hard to think of something more patriotic than saying that the United States will not step away from the continent liberated from the Nazis by the blood of American soldiers and held safe from Soviet tyranny over the course of the Cold War. Unlike Donald Trump, Democrats need to remind Americans that we live in a world of historical context, even as they clearly need to educate citizens as to that context.
Should this be the Democrats’ primary line of attack against Donald Trump? Of course not. But to leave it on the floor would be a political, moral, and foreign policy failure. Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine will result in increased Ukrainian battlefield and civilian losses (though I hold out some hope that European allies will start to fill the void left by the U.S., out of their clear, direct self-interest in doing so). From this point forward, Democrats should place Ukrainian civilian casualties and military setbacks squarely at Trump’s feet, as a result of his unholy alliance with Putin and withdrawal of US material support and intelligence. An aggressive stance would include phrases like “complicit in murder” and “treachery against a democratic ally under attack by a murderous regime.” Democrats also have an interest in telegraphing to Ukrainians and to our European allies that most Americans are in fact opposed to Trump’s actions, both to maintain credibility for when the Democrats regain power and to reject complicity in Trump’s actions. This would also lay the groundwork for continued attacks on Trump should the worst come to pass, and Russia’s war on Ukraine segues into attacks on allies like Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Democrats should also not passively accept that Trump has somehow permanently altered the rules of American politics. Any past American president who abandoned allies and threw in with an adversary like Russia would rightly have been accused of treason against the United States. The fact that the Democrats are too timid to use such language does not change the fact that Trump is indeed arguably committing treason in his embrace of Vladimir Putin and the horrendous attendant cost to American national security, not to mention the unspeakable cost in lives and prosperity to Ukraine and potentially other European allies. Though Trump may have intimidated and disoriented many elected Democrats with his rapid-fire, illegal destruction of large segments of the federal government, his opponents must get back on their feet and re-take the initiative where they can in order to further exploit his weakness when he inevitably falters or sparks a voter backlash. As Greg Sargent wrote last week, Trump’s claims to be an economic miracle worker are the glue that holds the MAGA coalition together; should he continue to drive the U.S. economy into a tailspin, the American public’s willingness to accept his murderous policy in Ukraine could conceivably flip into horror at what he’s done in America’s name.
I want to end on a cautiously optimistic note by giving credit to those Democrats who are speaking up about Ukraine. In fact, the surprising number who spoke out about the terrible Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy was a healthy sign that some are still willing to attack Trump’s displays of weakness, and understand the potency of foreign policy issues. In particular, Senator Chris Murphy provided a vital framework for viewing events when he pointed out not only that Trump is seeking an alliance with Russia and other despots, but that the purpose of such alliances is to make it easier for Trump to rip off Americans. Understanding that what Trump is doing with Russia is both intrinsically awful but also part of a broader vision, in which an autocratic American government makes common cause with dictators and oligarchs around the globe to crush democracy, is surely a key part of the Ukraine story. The Ukraine story, in turn, can help provide a concrete example of Trump’s autocratic, anti-democratic approach to the world.
I would also point to Senator Mark Kelly’s account of his recent trip to Ukraine as a strong model for Democrats to follow in communicating to the public about the stakes of the war for the United States. Kelly offered a personal account of his on-the-ground encounters with Ukrainians affected by the Russian invasion, humanizing their suffering and sacrifice. He described the Russians’ targeting of civilians (including Ukrainian hospitals) and how various Russian actions constitute war crimes. Critically, he communicated why American support for Ukraine matters, writing, “It’s not “America First” to pull the rug out from under an ally and leave their people to die. This kind of foreign policy will end with no one in the world trusting America. Our alliances give us strength and the damage being done makes our country weaker and us all less safe.” This is the way that it should be done — linking the tangible harms to Ukrainians to the U.S.’s own safety, and in doing so making an implicit argument for how it helps us to protect others.
Finally, we should note that Kelly’s initiative in visiting and advocating for Ukraine provoked a brutal attack from Elon Musk, who in a tweet called Kelly a “traitor” for his report from Ukraine. Musk’s tweet reflects its author’s pro-Russian bias, but its hysterical slander also highlights MAGA’s keen need to deny the most basic fact of the Ukraine war — that it is Donald Trump who is betraying the U.S. through his assistance to Vladimir Putin. In leveling such a charge against a naval officer and former astronaut, it feels to me that Musk badly overplayed his hand in a way that will come back to haunt him and Trump. Kelly responded by writing that “Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.” This is the right attitude for Kelly and other Democrats to take — defiant, seizing the high ground, and granting no good faith to those who so openly root for America’s enemies to win.