Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Then-President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, July 7, 2017.
By a substantial bipartisan vote (70 to 29), the Senate has now passed and sent to the House the long-touted bill to provide military funding to both Ukraine and Israel. The House, says Speaker Mike Johnson, won’t consider it.
Initially, of course, House Republicans said such a bill had to be linked to more funding for our border with Mexico and to policy changes that would reduce the flow of immigrants and asylum seekers into the U.S. With Democratic mayors and governors loudly noting their own inability to handle the sizable influx of immigrants on their doorsteps, President Biden and most congressional Democrats agreed to compromise border legislation drafted chiefly by Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford. Confronted with the horror of, by their standards, a successful deal with Biden and the Democrats, the House Republicans, egged on by right-wing media, reflexively recoiled, soon to be joined by all but a handful of their Senate counterparts. That leaves them free to oppose the aid to Ukraine per se, which constitutes the lion’s share of the funding that the Senate just authorized.
The main argument Republicans have advanced for opposing the Ukraine aid is that the money would be better spent at the border, though, of course, it’s the selfsame Republicans who have kept that from happening. The more general argument they’ve advanced is that, as the redoubtable Marjorie Taylor Greene has put it, aid to Ukraine “puts America last,” which means “we’re ignoring our own people’s problems.”
But with the exception of more funding for a bigger, better border wall, it’s nearly impossible to find anything domestic that Republicans actually want to spend money on. The 920-page Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a second Trump administration, which I reviewed in our December print issue, advocates spending boosts for the border and the Pentagon, but cutting back on nearly everything else (their favorite remedy, which pops up in their discussions of dozens of federal policies, is to privatize government programs, beginning with Medicare). Greene may want to spend your tax dollars on anti-missiles targeted to shoot down Jewish space lasers, but it’s hard to find Republican support for other specific policies to which money that could otherwise go to Ukraine can be redirected.
That leaves only the possibility that the Trumpified Republican Party, like Trump himself, actually supports Putin and Putin’s war, either because Putin is a hard-right homophobe (the source of his appeal to Pat Buchanan more than 20 years ago, and to Christian nationalists today) or simply the kind of thug whom Trump wants to emulate (and thus appealing to the GOP’s legions of thug-o-crats). Those appear to be the two dominant schools of thought in Trumpland, though it’s possible, of course, to adhere to both.
