Trump has one idea

I grew up a Reagan Republican in the middle of the Cold War, and I never thought I’d see the day when the president of the US became the world’s most prominent and effective Russian propagandist.

Yet that’s exactly what happened last week, when President Donald Trump began a diplomatic offensive against the nation of Ukraine and the person of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

This month, the administration couldn’t seem to get its message straight. First it seemed to want to offer unilateral concessions to the Russian government — including by taking Nato membership for Ukraine off the table and recognising Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine — only to walk back the concessions days (or hours) later.

The cumulative effect was confusing. What was the administration’s position on Ukraine? Last week, however, the words and actions of the administration left us with no doubt — the US is taking Russia’s side in the conflict.

What other conclusion should we draw when Secretary of State Marco Rubio begins peace negotiations with Russia without Ukraine or any of our Nato allies at the table, dangling “historic economic and investment opportunities” for Russia if the conflict ends? What other conclusion should we draw when Trump demands ruinous economic concessions from Ukraine to compensate the US for its prior aid? He’s demanding a higher share of gross domestic product from Ukraine than the victorious Allies demanded from Germany after World War I.

What other conclusion should we draw when Trump — incredibly enough — blames Ukraine for starting the conflict and calls Zelensky a “dictator”? What other conclusion should we draw when the Trump administration reportedly proposed sending Chinese soldiers to police a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, an act that would place troops from our chief geopolitical foe on allied soil in the heart of Europe? As noted Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama observed last week: “The US under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp, supporting right-wing authoritarians around the world from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orban to Nayib Bukele.” The conclusion is inescapable. As Vice-President JD Vance said in his speech to the Munich Security Conference on February 14, the administration is much more concerned about the “enemy within” — what it sees as censorship in Western Europe — than it is about hostile foreign powers.

The pattern we are seeing abroad mimics the pattern that we’ve been seeing at home. Trump’s enemies are now the US government’s enemies. There is one standard of justice for friends of Trump and another one for everyone else.

He began, of course, by pardoning his shock troops — the men and women who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, beat police officers and then tried to disrupt the lawful transfer of power to Joe Biden.

The full extent of Trump’s January 6 pardons is only now coming into focus. Department of Justice officials are arguing that Trump’s clemency even covers unrelated crimes — including gun crimes — uncovered as part of the January 6 investigations.

The favours haven’t stopped. He pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for no apparent legal reason at all — other than the fact that Blagojevich had declared himself a “Trump-o-crat.” Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defence lawyer and his acting deputy attorney general, ordered federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop the government’s corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. Despite denials, the decision appeared to be a pure quid pro quo — the case goes away so long as Adams cooperates with Trump’s immigration enforcement policies.

The decision was so improper that it triggered a righteous revolt in the Department of Justice. Conservative attorneys resigned, writing letters of resignation that outlined the course of events, exposed the flaws in the administration’s legal rationale and condemned the administration’s misconduct.

In 2016, a reporter named Salena Zito wrote a piece in The Atlantic that helped define early perceptions of Trump. The press takes Trump “literally, but not seriously,” she said; meanwhile, she wrote, his supporters “take him seriously, but not literally.” We now know that we should have taken him literally and seriously. He intended to be taken literally and seriously his first term. He remains furious that key members of his team kept trying to block his worst and wildest ideas.

The first month of Trump’s second term should tell us that no one in the administration is stopping Trump now. He’s surrounded by fanatical supporters, and any dissent will be crushed.

America has endured dangerous periods of democratic backsliding before. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction and helped plunge the South into the darkness of Jim Crow. Woodrow Wilson was a racist authoritarian who segregated the Civil Service and prosecuted thousands of Americans who objected to US entry into World War I.

But I cannot recall a moment in which a president broke free of the bounds of law and morality so quickly and comprehensively. In one month, Trump has endorsed Russian propaganda, switched sides in the Ukraine war, threatened our closest allies, attacked the constitutional order and begun imposing a two-tiered system of justice.

This state of affairs is unrecognisable to most Americans. But Putin recognises it. So does Chinese President Xi Jinping. In Trump, they can plainly see a version of themselves. He is doing their work for them. He is damaging American democracy, diminishing American power, and destroying American alliances with an energy and an efficiency that must exceed their wildest dreams.