Trump and the War

Will Trump’s past support for Putin make it harder for him to re-take the Presidency in 2024?

Putin and Trump meet at the G20 Summit in Osaka 2019 (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

One of the great “what ifs“ for future historians will be how the Russo-Ukraine War might have gone had Trump won in 2020. On one hand he’d made supportive statements about Putin; criticised NATO; used America First rhetoric; and withheld aid from Ukraine. On the other hand Republican Senators may have rebelled had he refused to respond to Russian aggression (as they did when, with staggering naivety, he seemed to agree to set up a joint cyber-security unit with Putin). It’s certainly arguable that European leaders would have been more cautious had they been less confident of American backing; the whole Western response might have been undermined, with serious consequences for Ukraine.

Trump’s behaviour since the war started shows how hard it is to deduce what his response might have been. He has never noticeably prized coherence, excepting his passionate commitment to his own financial interests, but on this he has jumped from calling Putin “very savvy” and a “genius” on the eve of war to now calling the Russian invasion “a holocaust” and complaining that others are misrepresenting his previous statements on Putin. In recent days he seems to have settled for blaming Biden for the war, without any rationale.

This goes beyond a matter of historical curiosity because Trump remains the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024. He hasn’t committed to running but is holding rallies in key primary states and has strongly hinted at another campaign. In polls against other possible candidates he was well ahead before the war began. A month into the war his approval ratings remain steady. A poll from early March shows a dead heat in a hypothetical match-up with Biden at 45-45. Trump isn’t popular outside the Republican base, but Biden is unpopular too, and may not even be able to stand in 2024. The White House has had, at best, only a small polling bump from their response to the war, and, with plenty of economic challenges to come over the next few years, a second Trump Presidency is entirely plausible.

This raises the question as to whether the war in Ukraine will, over time, hurt his chances, in the same way it has weakened pro-Putin politicians in Europe. A small but very noisy cadre of his most hardcore supporters continue to push Kremlin lines – most notably Tucker Carlson, one of Fox News most popular presenters, who has gone as far to say he supports Russia, and last week was spreading disinformation about US bio-labs in Ukraine. While other Fox presenters aren’t quite as extreme, others have continued to air conspiracies and imply Biden is using the war to avoid domestic problems. The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, said on Friday, with a knowing look, that in the US “only Fox News is trying to present some alternative points of view.”

Alongside Carlson are a handful of GOP Representatives including the truly demented Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, who voted against ending trade relations with Russia. Greene in particular has continued to push Kremlin conspiracies about Ukraine. Others who have been associated with the more extreme end of the Trump fanbase like talk show host Candace Owens and white nationalist Nick Fuentes have persisted with strongly pro-Russia lines.

But the starkness of Putin’s crimes has pushed most Republicans away from the America First rhetoric that Trump and his MAGA fans often employed. The vast majority of GOP voters think America is either doing the right amount or not enough to support Ukraine. And most Republican legislators have followed this line, criticising Biden for not doing more to help, and standing in support of Zelensky when he spoke to Congress.

In a rational world this should make it more difficult for them to back Trump, given his previous positions on Putin, Ukraine and NATO. And there are a few signs of this. Trump’s former Vice-President, and possible challenger in the 2024 primaries, Mike Pence made a thinly veiled attack on his former boss in a speech to donors on the 5th March saying: “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom.” In the competitive primary to be the Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina, Pat McCrory put out an ad attacking his Trump-endorsed opponent for positive comments about Putin. The increasingly Trumpian J. D. Vance, standing in the Ohio Senate primary, has dropped well behind in his race, and been disinvited from key events, in part due to his America First stance on Ukraine (“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine”).  

The current GOP’s ability to sustain cognitive dissonance, though, is unparalleled in modern democratic politics. A handful of Republican Congressmen and women, who had previous spoken out against Trump, like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have explicitly pointed to Trump’s failings on Ukraine. But most are happily attacking Biden’s “weakness” in not giving enough weaponry to Zelensky, while conveniently forgetting Trump’s previous positions.

In this they are helped by the astonishingly high levels of partisanship in the US which encourages voters to contort themselves into whatever contradictory position is necessary in order to continue endorsing their party. So Republicans are simultaneously more likely than Democrats to say that Biden isn’t doing enough to help the Ukrainians and far less likely than Democrats to say that they would think less of politicians who have made pro-Putin comments in the past.

The extent to which partisanship rather than issues now drives US voter behaviour can be seen in YouGov polling which shows that Republicans are quite happy to memory-hole inconvenient facts. Just 19% think Trump withheld aid from Ukraine and just 28% think Russia interfered on Trump’s side in the 2016 election (despite every US intelligence agency confirming that they did). 60% now oppose the idea of Russia re-joining the G7 but just 19% did in 2018 when Trump suggested the idea. Rather astonishingly just 15% of GOP voters think Trump was too friendly to Russia as President but 58% think Biden has been!

This shows the way forward for Trump. He will likely be increasingly supportive of efforts to support Ukraine, and critical of Biden for allowing the war to happen, emphasising it didn’t happen on his watch (81% of Republicans agree with the statement “if Donald Trump were in office, this deadly Ukraine situation would never have happened”). He will flat out deny previous statements of support for Putin or criticisms of Zelensky. Most of the Republican party will go along with this as they have with all of his previous absurdities.

If he runs, as we must assume he will, his potential primary opponents will have to decide if they want to try and make an issue out of it – but the only people with any chance of beating him are those who can appeal to his base. The constituency for a centre-right, Liz Cheney-style, candidate remains small. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor, who is widely seen as the favourite if Trump doesn’t stand, went immediately for the crushingly predictable partisan response: “When Obama was President, Putin took Crimea. When Trump was President, they didn’t take anything. And now Biden’s President and they’re rolling into Ukraine.”

The one caveat in all this is whether the Democrats would try to use Trump’s on the record statements about Putin as a major focus of attack in a hypothetical 2024 election. There’s no way of knowing, yet, how that might appeal to the small pool of floating voters or whether it would encourage just enough security-minded Republicans to stay at home. But we can be fairly confident that it will not harm his chances in the primaries. The Republican Party is just too far gone for things like facts to matter anymore.