Matt Dunham/AP Photo
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the Munich Security Conference, February 19, 2022, in Munich, Germany
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has become an international celebrity overnight on the strength of his wartime leadership. An actor who literally played the president in a goofy comedy and once played the piano on TV with an, uh, unusual body part has turned out to be equal parts master diplomat and staggeringly courageous war leader. Unlike many wartime politicians who flee at the first sign of danger, he has doggedly refused to leave Ukraine—part of a virtuoso political performance that has boosted morale within the country and helped sway the world to his side. Ukrainian expatriates are pouring back into the country to volunteer, and a five-minute video call with Zelensky reportedly tipped the balance among Western European leaders toward assisting him.
So let’s take a trip down memory lane to recall the appalling ways American conservatives have abused Zelensky and his country. Less than a week ago, Republicans were openly celebrating what they thought was going to be an easy Russian victory. And years before that, President Donald Trump tried to hold Ukrainian national security hostage in a scheme to extort Zelensky into inventing a smear story about Joe Biden. It was all unspeakably callous.
Right before the invasion, Trump, as usual, heaped praise on Vladimir Putin—explicitly for conquering a foreign country. “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” Immediately after the tanks rolled, he said, “This is genius … how smart is that? Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.” Fox News host Laura Ingraham mocked Zelensky’s desperate attempts to head off an invasion: “We had kind of a really pathetic display from the Ukrainian President Zelensky, earlier today … in Russian, he was essentially imploring Vladimir Putin not to invade his country … now, we basically have the Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations looking like a defeated man.” Tucker Carlson called Ukraine “a pure client state of the United States State Department,” and implied that there was no reason to dislike Putin, asking: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?”
What we see here is that the American conservative movement is composed of cruel bullies—like the numerous right-wing radio hosts who used to mock people who died of AIDS. Trump caught on with the Republican base in large part because he gleefully insulted out-groups like disabled folks, Mexicans, and Muslims, and got away with it. And there is nothing a bully likes more than watching a helpless victim who can’t fight back get beaten to a pulp. Conservatives love Putin not only because he has created the kind of ethnonationalist autocracy with a fake democratic facade that they want to build in the U.S., but also because he is murderously vicious toward weaker nations like Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine.
The other thing about bullies, however, is that they are cowards. Putin, for instance, is plainly terrified of the coronavirus, as shown by the comically huge tables he uses for meeting with other world leaders and his own subordinates—an understandable precaution on some level, but also a behavior that cuts against his chest-thumping macho image. It’s not a coincidence that under Putin a signature Russian army tactic has been shelling civilian cities into powder from a great distance.
It turns out toughness isn’t measured by how willing you are to hit apartment blocks with rockets from 100 miles away, or how many times you complain about pronouns online.
American conservatives thought they were going to get to watch a liberal comedian get brutally defeated by a right-wing tyrant, if not murdered outright. They had their tailgating party all ready to go. Except it turns out toughness isn’t measured by how willing you are to hit apartment blocks with rockets from 100 miles away, or how many times you complain about pronouns online. Liberal comedians can be tough as nails, and so can schoolteachers.
It’s one thing to celebrate a victorious tyrant, but it’s quite another to stand with a hapless numbskull who is unable to defeat a heroic underdog despite massively superior forces. So Fox News has desperately tried to pivot—not by admitting error, of course, but by changing the subject. Ingraham recently argued bizarrely that China was somehow behind the invasion, and hence deserves sanctions, while Carlson has characteristically whined about himself. In a recent segment, he suggested that he would be persecuted by the Biden administration for his “dissent” from its views.
But this is far from the worst thing that American conservatives have done to Ukraine and Zelensky. The event has been weirdly absent from the media coverage thus far, but recall that the first time Trump was impeached, it was for trying to blackmail the Ukrainian president into inventing damaging stories about Joe Biden, to serve as fodder for Trump’s 2020 campaign. “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” he told Zelensky on a phone call when asked about promised weapons sales, later mentioning false stories about Joe Biden and his son. Trump associates Mick Mulvaney and Rudy Giuliani both explicitly admitted the scheme in public.
At the time, the criticism of Trump centered on how it was morally appalling and grossly corrupt for an American president to blackmail foreign countries into serving up propaganda lies for his own political use. That was indeed bad, but now, Putin’s invasion radically changes the context of that story. Trump withheld FGM-148 Javelin missiles that were only theoretically useful at the time, but now are turning out to be a vital weapon against invading Russian tanks.
Moreover, Putin’s stated reasons for invading—that Ukraine is a fake country made up by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, that it was always part of the czarist empire anyhow, and that it’s full of Nazis (who somehow elected a Jewish president?)—undermine the idea that this invasion was motivated by NATO encroachment. Though I do still believe NATO enlargement in the ’90s and 2000s was unwise and may have played some role in Putin’s thinking, today it seems much more plausible that at bottom, he is just another Russian imperialist in a tradition going back centuries.
It remains to be seen whether Ukraine will be able to hold out long enough for some kind of diplomatic settlement to be reached. Despite Ukrainians’ determined resistance thus far, they likely won’t be able to hold out forever, especially not if Putin resorts to his usual war crimes strategy.
But these stories really underline the wretched immorality of the American conservative movement. The last century has been monstrously bloody for Ukraine, given the Holodomor famine, the Holocaust, the devastating fighting of the Eastern Front in World War II, 70 years of Soviet domination, economic catastrophe caused by neoliberal privatization, and on and on. It’s the kind of carnage and oppression that most Americans can’t possibly imagine.
All President Zelensky wanted when he was elected was democratic self-rule and a chance for Ukraine to be treated as an equal sovereign state. “I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chess board of big global players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of some bargain,” he said in a 2019 interview. “As for the United States, I would really want … for them to help us, to understand us, to see that we are a player in our own right, that they cannot make deals about us with anyone behind our backs.
It doesn’t seem like too much to ask. But if it were up to them, Republicans would have thrown Zelensky to the wolves if it got them more power—or just for the sick pleasure of it.
