Trump’s Admiration of Putin Is Dangerous for America

For a decade, Trump has remained consistently loyal to Putin. That may be good for Russia, but not America.

On August 17, 2016, in my Washington Post column, I wrote the following:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to see Donald Trump become the next president of the United States. To that end, Putin and his government have taken unprecedented steps to influence our electoral process to help the Republican Party's nominee. Whether Russia's interventions will succeed is not obvious. But it's clear that Putin's government has the motives — and the means — to try.”

In this column, I explained why “Putin has rational motives for wanting Trump to win,” including Trump’s pledge “to ‘look into’ recognition of Crimea as a part of Russia,” Trump’s “disdain for the United States’ alliances around the world [and] his “isolationist policies,” and indifference to “promoting democracy and human rights.” I also cited experts on U.S. politics who predicted a “tumultuous period domestically” if Trump were elected, which I argued would benefit Putin because a “United States convulsed by infighting over Trump's deeply divisive policy proposals gives Putin more freedom to act around the world.”

I am used to criticism on social media. But this column generated an explosion of ridicule when published. Back then, few could imagine that a U.S. presidential candidate could be so supportive of Putin’s Russia or that Russia would try to intervene in our elections to help Trump win. I was accused of smearing Trump and exaggerating the Russian threat. I was told with certainty that there was no evidence to support my hypothesis about Russian interference in our presidential election. My critics said that I didn’t like Trump and was overestimating the Russian threat because Putin didn’t like me during my term as the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow.

Reread that column today. My guess is that you won't find anything extraordinary there. That is because eight years later, my observations about the Trump-Putin bromance remain true today. Trump still praises Putin. And Putin, yet again, as we learned in greater detail yesterday, with a new Department of Justice indictment of Russian agents, is still trying to help Trump win reelection.  As CNN summarized,  "The goal of the  [Russian] operation, according to prosecutors, was to fuel pro-Russian narratives, in part, by pushing content and news articles favoring Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others who the Kremlin deemed to be friendlier to its interests."  

Over the last eight years, Trump has zigged and zagged on many foreign policy issues, such as the withdrawal of Afghanistan and Syria or dealing with China, but remained amazingly consistent on one commitment: his admiration for Putin. Trump has continually tried to befriend Putin, even when it was considered politically unwise and opposed by many in his administration. Trump thinks that Putin is a strong and brilliant leader.  In 2016,  presidential candidate Donald Trump praised Putin because he has “very strong control over his country” and has been “a leader, far more than our president [Obama] has been a leader.” When Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough questioned candidate Trump in 2016 about Putin’s killing of opposition journalists, he replied, “Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe.” In 2017, when Bill O'Reilly on Fox News called Putin “a killer,” President Trump responded with, “There are a lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country's so innocent?” Trump never criticized Putin for invading Ukraine in 2014 or 2022, meddling in our elections, or killing opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump Meeting in Helsinki on 16 July 2018. Source: Office of the President of the Russian Federation via Wiki Commons.

Most shockingly, during his press conference with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, President Trump expressed his disagreement with his own U.S. intelligence community about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and instead agreed with Putin. I was in Helsinki that day helping with the NBC coverage of that summit and could not believe that Trump said that. During that same meeting, Trump also embraced Putin’s proposal to allow the Kremlin prosecutors to interrogate numerous U.S. citizens (and one British citizen, Bill Browder), including me, who allegedly had committed crimes against the Russian government. (Read about this bizarre and, thankfully, failed exchange idea here.) After the one-on-one meeting between Putin and Trump during the same Helsinki Summit, Trump refused to debrief his senior staff, telling his senior advisor on Russia, “This is between me and my friend.”

Talking to our adversaries is a necessary part of diplomacy. During the Cold War, presidents from Kennedy to Reagan met with Soviet Communist Party general secretaries. Over the last two decades, every U.S. president – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden – met with Putin. When conducted effectively, these meetings advanced American national security interests without befriending dictators or checking our values at the door.

Trump, however, thinks that a good meeting – especially one filled with praise for himself – is the goal in and of itself. As Trump tweeted on March 21, 2018, soon after Putin stole an election to remain president for a fourth term, “Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing…” Consequently, President Trump’s courtship of Putin produced few tangible outcomes for U.S. national security interests. Trump’s flattery of Putin did not deter the Kremlin’s assassination attempt of Sergey Skripal in the United Kingdom, the murders of Chechen dissidents in Germany and Austria, the poisoning of Alexei Navalny with a Novichok, or Russian cyberattacks against American companies and the U.S. government. Trump did not convince Putin to end his war in eastern Ukraine or withdraw from Crimea. When Trump claims now that there was no war between Russia and Ukraine on his watch, that’s just wrong. The war in eastern Ukraine continued for the entirety of Trump’s presidency, and he did nothing to try to end it. Trump also did not sign an arms control treaty with Russia, did not persuade Putin to help the United States stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and failed to secure Russia’s cooperation in ending the civil war in Syria.

In an unprecedented divide between a president and his national security team, the Trump administration at times did pursue more confrontational policies toward Putin’s Russia, including expelling Russian diplomats with ties to Russian intelligence, sanctioning Russian companies, and sending a modest military package to Ukraine. But Trump senior administration officials took these actions almost always without the president's blessing. Should Trump get elected, none of these key figures on Trump’s national security team will serve in a second term. Trump will be able to lean into his instincts of appeasement toward Putin without constraint.

And that would not be good for American national security interests. In a second term, Trump will cut off military aid to Ukraine and pressure President Zelenskyy to swap land for peace to appease Putin. Such a policy of pleasing Putin would be horrible for American security interests, like the 1930s. We know from that era how appeasing Hitler produced only temporary peace and encouraged more aggressive Nazi military actions, including the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine also will embolden Xi to use force to seize Taiwan. On the campaign trail this year, Trump has already sparked doubts about the credibility of our commitment to help defend Taiwan. Trump’s renewed embrace of Putin will also fuel divisions within NATO over sustaining aid to Ukraine or maintaining sanctions on  Russia. More broadly, Trump’s effort to please the Russian dictator will radically undermine America's reputation as the leader of the free world.

Therefore, Putin has good reasons to want to see Trump reelected, just as he did in 2016 and 2020, as was well-documented in Senate investigations, Robert Mueller’s report, and intelligence assessments. Yesterday, the Department of Justice indicted two employees of the state-controlled media Russia Today (RT) for disseminating propaganda “without identifying, and in fact purposefully obfuscating, the Russian government or its agents as the source of the content” and seized 32 related internet domains. These two RT employees tried to orchestrate “a nearly $10 million scheme to hire a Tennessee-based company to publish and disseminate pro-Russian content.” The fact that they were trying to mask their actions indicates their awareness of the illegality of such actions. As the DOJ affidavit explained,

“Under the direction and control of the Russian Presidential Administration, and in particular KIRIYENKO, Russian companies, including SDA led by GAMBASHIDZE, STRUCTURA led by TUPIKIN, and ANO Dialog led by TABAK, have used the SUBJECT DOMAINS to engage in foreign malign influence campaigns … designed to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies, and influence voters in U.S. and foreign elections by posing as citizens of those countries, impersonating legitimate news outlets, and peddling Russian government propaganda under the guise of independent media brands.”

Yesterday, the Biden administration also sanctioned several Russian government agents related to the two indicted RT journalists, including finally the RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, and designated “Rossiya Segodnya, and subsidiaries RIA Novosti, RT, TV-Novosti, Ruptly, and Sputnik, as foreign missions.” 

Aspiration is not achievement. Just as it was an impossible social science task to identify a direct causal link between Putin’s meddling in our elections in 2016 and 2020 and the final electoral outcome, I predict the same will be true regarding the 2024 election. But Putin’s efforts to help Trump, as revealed yet again by the Department of Justice yesterday, should serve as an important data point for American voters. Putin has signaled which presidential candidate he believes is best for Russian interests. Hopefully, American voters will learn from Putin’s actions which presidential candidate is best for American interests.