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Over the weekend, former president Donald Trump held a rally in South Carolina. Rallies are where Trump is at his most pure, unburdened by the constraints of tenor and rhetoric that often bind his media interviews and focused solely on what gets the most applause from his audience. Trump often derides polling, but his rallies unquestionably serve the same purpose for him: giving him a chance to test ideas and lines with his most energetic supporters.
This is an important if underrecognized aspect of Trump’s politics: He has always followed opinion, not led it. What set him apart in 2016 wasn’t that he brought new ideas to the mix; it was that he was willing — unlike established Republican candidates — to say the things that conservative voters already heard on Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart and Fox News. My favorite example of this pattern from Trump is the Iraq War, which he has long claimed to have opposed — but which he publicly opposed only once mainstream opinion of the war had gone in the same direction.
What that means in the moment is that Trump’s stated views of the war in Ukraine have shifted over the past few weeks, with one exception. Even now, he’s unwilling to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In January, as American officials were raising the alarm about the buildup of Russian forces on Ukraine’s border, Trump was mostly quiet. Granted, he has fewer outlets to be heard now than he once did, but even as the national political conversation increasingly turned to Russia and Ukraine, Trump didn’t weigh in.
Then, in February, Putin announced that he was recognizing the independence of two breakaway regions of Ukraine — ones that Russia had for years bolstered militarily, if unofficially. He then used this as a pretext to send the first Russians of the invasion force onto Ukrainian soil.
Trump’s initial reaction was recorded in an interview with a right-wing radio show on Feb. 22. He was asked what President Biden could have done differently in response to Russia’s aggression. Trump replied that he saw news of Russia’s machinations on television.
“I said, ‘This is genius,’” Trump said. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”
(At some point on Feb. 27, the show’s transcript was updated to state that this comment from Trump was “sarcastic.”)
“So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine,” Trump continued. “I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper.”
The next night, Trump spoke at the corporate equivalent of a political rally: an event being held at his Mar-a-Lago resort. There, he expanded his praise for Putin into criticism of the West’s response.
“‘Trump said Putin’s smart.’ I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart,” Trump said. “He’s taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, just walking right in — this would have never happened, ever in a million years, would have never happened. And I know him really well.”
It’s important to note that this was before the full invasion began. Trump’s comment about “walking in” was generally true, given that it was apparently focused on Russia’s claim that it needed to aid those newly “independent” countries with military force.
The full-scale invasion followed a few days later. Trump’s first public response to it came in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He began by trying to reframe his prior comments.
“Yesterday, reporters asked me if I thought President Putin was smart. I said, of course he’s smart. To which I was greeted with, ‘Oh, that’s such a terrible thing to say.’ I like to tell the t— Yes, he’s smart,” Trump said. This, of course, was not what he was asked in that first interview. (He did, however, correctly cut himself off before saying that he “liked to tell the truth.”)
Notice that he still rises to Putin’s personal defense — particularly in contrast to the opposition.
“The NATO nations, and indeed the world, as he looks over what’s happening strategically with no repercussions or threats whatsoever — they’re not so smart,” he continued. “They’re looking the opposite of smart. ‘If you take over Ukraine, we’re going to sanction you,’ they say. Sanction? Well, that’s a pretty weak statement. Putin is saying, ‘Oh they’re going to sanction me? They’ve sanctioned me for the last 25 years. You mean I can take over a whole country and they’re going to sanction me? You mean they’re not going blow us to pieces, at least psychologically?’ The problem is not that Putin is smart, which of course he’s smart, but the real problem is that our leaders are dumb.”
Trump also spoke to reporters at a brief news conference that same day. There, he was more disparaging of the invasion itself, and he praised the Ukrainian response.
“When you watch it, when you see what’s going on. Now, who knows where it’s going? Very brave people, these — the way they’re fighting, it’s an amazing thing,” he said. “But this would never have happened. Already thousands of people are dead.” This has become a common theme in his responses: the unprovable insistence that there would have been no invasion if he were still president.
He again downplayed the role of sanctions — “sanctions are very expensive for our country also” — though, echoing the broader conversation of the moment, he suggested that Russia be expelled from the SWIFT banking system. (It was the next day.) Asked what advice he might give Biden, Trump would only offer an unsubtle hint.
“There are things that he should do — I would rather not tell him under this forum. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that, but there are things he could do that are very strong, very powerful, that I think would end it pretty quickly,” Trump said. “But remember this: We are the greatest nuclear power.”
It’s important to notice how Trump, who long boasted of having not started any new conflicts as president, spoke more openly about a military response at CPAC. Here, again, he was reflecting a growing sentiment in his party.
At a gathering of top-tier Republican donors on March 5, Trump was explicit: Maybe the the United States should reflag its aircraft as Chinese and bomb Russian troops. Then, he said, “We say, China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.” The audience laughed.
It’s fair to assume that this comment was not meant literally, though we should perhaps consider it as part of a lengthy history of Trump saying inappropriate things as a way to gauge temperature. But what the comment did do was reinforce the audience response to a bold idea of attacking Russian forces: enthusiasm.
Last Thursday, Trump offered his longest comments yet on the situation during a Fox News conversation with his friend Sean Hannity. Hannity, often the self-appointed sandpaper to Trump’s rough-hewn rhetoric, tried to get Trump to agree that Putin himself was evil, but Trump wouldn’t bite.
As president, he had “a very strong conversation with President Putin, and he understood,” Trump said. “And I won’t go into the great details of the conversation. Because nobody has to know that, but I will tell you, it never ever would have happened.” (That “nobody has to know” a conversation between the American president and an opposing aggressor can be evaluated on its own merits.)
At another point, he pointed out that his initial praise for Putin came before the full invasion. He also suggested that Putin’s personality had changed, then making the odd claim that “if I were dealing with him, he wouldn’t have changed.” He later added that “Putin is sort of in a bad corner, because this was supposed to be over quickly. And it’s turning in to be a disaster, because the Ukrainians are brilliant fighters.” At another point, he called the invasion “a crime against humanity.”
He was more specific in articulating what Biden should do: “He should say, ‘We are a nuclear nation, and we don’t want war … and we don’t want to wipe out Russia.’ ” By not threatening Russia with nuclear war, he claimed, Biden was “playing right into Putin’s hands.” (You may recall reports from 2016 in which Trump reportedly asked why the United States couldn’t initiate nuclear strikes.)
This, of course, is the central theory of Trump’s politics: that the most important trait is the perception of personal strength. It’s what draws Trump to authoritarian leaders like Putin in the first place; his praise for Putin’s savvy at the outset was really praise for brazenness.
“I got along with these people. I got along with them well,” Trump told Hannity. “That doesn’t mean they are good people. It doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that I understood them and perhaps they understood me. Maybe they understood me even better, that’s okay, because they knew there’d be a big penalty.”
“The problem with Putin, he’s got a very big ego,” Trump added later. “And if he ends now, in most forms, if he ends now, it’s going to look like a big loss for him, even if he takes a little extra territory.” This is probably accurate. It certainly overlaps with the sense of mutual understanding that Trump had previously articulated. But, again, it is not a criticism.
Which brings us to the rally in South Carolina.
“Nobody can look at the bloodshed much longer, what’s happening,” Trump said of the current state of the war. He added that “it’s just so ridiculous and so senseless and so horrible.”
But in between, he offered his assessment of Putin.
“It’s a lack of respect — for a lot of people, a lot of things. But it’s just a total lack of respect,” Trump said. “And it happens to be a man that is just driven; he’s driven to put it together. … I’ll say it again and again: It should have never happened. If he respected our president, it would have never, ever happened.”
From the outset, Trump’s view of the invasion has been colored by two central beliefs: Putin is strong, which is good, and Biden, Democrats and NATO are weak. Those beliefs are not new; they are, instead, core to Trump’s political identity. Trump’s position on Ukraine has been buffeted to some extent: He is less willing to scoff at sanctions — though he pushes to be far tougher, as demonstrated with bombs — and he is more willing to describe Russia’s efforts in negative terms. But undergirding all of it is this undisguisable appreciation for Putin’s will. The Russian president is “just driven,” that’s all.
Even as Putin drives his country to economic ruin and his military to massive losses of life and equipment, even as Putin’s actions prompted this “crime against humanity,” Trump can’t help but admire that Putin had the chutzpah to do it in the first place.