5 uncomfortable truths about Trump and Russia
Let’s not mince words. Here are five highly uncomfortable facts about President Trump and his regime.
First, by undermining Ukraine’s ability to protect its civilian population against intensifying Russian missile and drone onslaughts, Trump has effectively endorsed Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war. As the military historian Phillips O’Brien puts it, we just experienced “The Week the USA Started Killing Ukrainians.”
Trump and his sycophantic subordinates and supporters don’t care, of course, but history will judge them severely. As might, at some point, the International Criminal Court. That Trump may justify the violence done to innocent Ukrainians by his desire to force Ukraine to the negotiating table with Russia doesn’t get him off the complicity hook.
Second, Trump is an imperialist. By laying claim to Greenland and the Panama Canal in his recent address before Congress, he has made their eventual appropriation by the U.S. official White House policy. He has also told Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he intends to revisit and presumably adjust America’s border with Canada.
Once again, I doubt Trump and his acolytes care, but history — and most formerly colonial states — will judge them severely.
Third, Trump will, perhaps unwittingly, embroil the globe in World War III. His enabling of Putin will inevitably encourage attempts by other genocidally-inclined warmongering states to follow in his footsteps. The result will be still more armed conflict, increased national intolerance, the galvanization of terrorism and growing global instability — all of which will eventually involve the great powers and their allies in a major conflagration.
Trump and his sycophants will disagree, of course, claiming that they want only peace and that the real perpetrators of war are its victims, such as Ukraine. But history won’t be fooled by their shameful rhetoric and will judge them for what they are.
Fourth, Trump is a wannabe dictator, perhaps even a wannabe fascist — terms I don’t use lightly. Dictators rule with total power (something Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky utterly lacks). Trump hasn’t achieved that degree of totality (something that Putin has), but he appears dead set on doing so in his second term. And his chances of succeeding look at least even.
Fascists, meanwhile, are popular, charismatic dictators with personality cults, with Italy’s Benito Mussolini being the quintessential example. Trump falls short on the total-power scale, but he does well on popularity, charisma and cult, and thereby qualifies for the modifier “fascistic.”
Taken together, these four facts highlight a fifth — that Trump is becoming less and less distinguishable from Putin. The Kremlin’s boss is an active genocidaire, an imperialist, a warmonger and a longstanding fascist dictator. Trump still has some way to go in each of these respects, but his goals are clear and the progress he’s made in just a few weeks bodes ill for the future of American democracy and international order. After all, his actions speak louder than his words.
It is small wonder that Trump and his team have swallowed Putin’s narrative, hook, line and sinker. Hence his allegations that Ukraine is the perpetrator of war and genocide, that Zelensky is illegitimate and that the “Kyiv regime” is fascist. In contrast, he frames Russia as the victim of evil Ukrainian designs and Putin is a democrat par excellence. Small wonder as well that Trump’s worshipful MAGA base and its spokesman Tucker Carlson have also swallowed the Russian narrative.
Putin’s propaganda of war, imperialism, genocide and dictatorship has long roots in imperial and Soviet Russian political culture. Trump’s aspirations figure far less prominently in the American mind. Few Americans want genocide, empire, war and dictatorship, especially today.
Unfortunately, Russian political culture and its unsavory dimensions will change only if Russia suffers a massive defeat and the Russian people come to their senses. With Trump propping up Putin, such an outcome looks unlikely.
The good news is that Trump’s project will, sooner or later, come into conflict with American values and meet an ignominious end — though not before having wreaked enormous damage on the U.S. and the world.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
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