Why Putin Is Now Our Ally

A headline on a piece that ran in today’s New York Times Science section—“When a Gun Owner Shows Early Signs of Dementia”—struck me as a statement of a problem writ small that we all now must encounter daily in its writ large version: When a president of the United States, who controls massive armed services and police forces and who’s already prey to narcissism and sociopathy, shows signs of growing mental inability to understand reality, thereby removing the last remaining checks on his narcissism and sociopathy. 

I note in passing that our Supreme Court (R-DC) has a record of both upholding the gun ownership of everybody, dementia patients included, and of bestowing immunity on presidents for official acts that would otherwise be criminal, the likelihood of which only increases when presidents are narcissistic, sociopathic, and increasingly exhibiting dementia. 

Unless every poll in recent months is completely wrong, Americans would be relieved and happy to be rid of Donald Trump, who has wielded his blunderbuss to start a war he has never seriously sought to justify, and which has raised the costs of living to the breaking point for tens of millions of his fellow Americans. He has wielded his muskets to toss many of those millions off of the only health insurance they could afford, to shutter hospitals, to help build data centers that render utility bills unaffordable, to impose tariffs that have increased the price of nearly everything, and to institute a reign of terror in cities, towns, and villages where immigrants live, work, and send their kids to school. 

And in the past two weeks, aided and abetted by Elon Musk, he’s cut off Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russia’s flying bombs and effectively revoked Congress’s bipartisan bill to expand sanctions on Russia, and earlier bills that initially imposed sanctions on Russia. He’s now blaming Ukraine and its president for prolonging Russia’s war of aggression against that nation by its refusal to surrender. 

We’ve grown so inured to Trump’s outrages that his alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s neo-Tsarist imperialist regime hasn’t yet stoked the level of horror and rage it deserves. To be sure, Trump had already signaled his clear indifference to democratic values when he sought to violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. By repositioning our nation to support Putin’s war, he’s now done the same in matters of foreign policy.

I’m not claiming, of course, that America has always been democracy’s friend in its conduct with other nations, as our 19th-century takeover of the Philippines and Cuba, our 19th and early 20th^–century armed interventions in Mexico, and our 20th-century overthrowing of the elected governments of Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, among numerous other interventions large and small, all make irrefutably clear. I am claiming that in Europe—the continent from which Trump, JD Vance, and MAGA ideologists all insist that America derived its fundamental Christian values and its fundamental white Christian immigrants who created the only real fundamental white Christian Americans —America has generally sided with democracies over its enemies, be they fascist or communist. 

That had already begun to change during Trump’s second term, what with the administration’s backing of Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian kleptocracy in Hungary, the neo-fascist AfD in Germany, and the racist Italian government of Giorgia Meloni (at least until Meloni became a Trump skeptic); and its tilt toward Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in Britain. As for Putin’s Russia, it has been the beau ideal for America’s neo-fascist right ever since Pat Buchanan began praising it for its intolerance of homosexuals and abortions in the early 2010s—blazing the trail that Tucker Carlson and kindred foes of democratic rights and Enlightenment values have been all too eager to follow. 

Were that not warning enough, Trump attested to New York Times writers Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan his envy for the leeway that such current authoritarians as Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have in using state violence to suppress their critics and anyone who may seem suspicious in his or her loyalty. 

So his siding with Putin against Ukraine—even as Putin’s Russia has begun to provoke such other former imperial territories (though long-established independent nations) as Estonia and Latvia, and such other nearby European nations as Poland and even Germany—is a culmination of previous pro-authoritarian impulses (at this stage in Trump’s presidency, the terms “impulse” and “policy” are effectively synonymous). But foreshadowed though it clearly was, it is also an immense reversal and betrayal of America’s stated values and, at our best (say, 1941-45), historic purposes. 

In a sane and decent world, this and January 6th, 2021, would suffice for Trump’s impeachment and conviction. This time around, I suspect there are enough Republican senators who understand that—which, of course, is not the same thing as actually voting to convict him.