With Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine now nearing its third week of active hostilities, the time may have come for conservatives of good conscience in the United States to take back the narrative from the Donald Trump-Tucker Carlson right wing. More than two million people have fled Ukraine, as Russian bombardment escalates. Thousands on both sides have already died; tens of thousands have been injured. Whatever the outcome of the war — and it does not look good for freedom — it will take decades for Ukraine to return to any sense of normalcy, even if the war were to end today. The part of the American right attracted to the Russian president’s autocracy may now be pushed to the side, at least that is the hope.
Donald Trump’s infatuation with Putin goes back at least to 2013, when he tweeted on the eve of his trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant that he hoped that he could become buddies with the Russian leader: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” This continued all the way through his presidency. And it continues now. As the invasion of Ukraine began, Mr. Trump told a roomful of guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort, “They say, ‘Trump said Putin’s smart.’ I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions . . . I’d say that’s pretty smart. He’s taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.” At a much smaller scale, we think of another invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that Mr. Trump also approved of.
So far, Republican leaders have only timidly stepped back from the Trumpist view that Russia’s brutal dictator-president can do no wrong. Still, they pretend to forget that Mr. Trump had withheld crucial military aid, an attempt to force the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden before the 2020 election — aid that Congress had already authorized. Before the invasion, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked why Americans should prefer Ukraine over Russia or hold a negative view of Putin; a few days later, however, he was less cavalier, saying, “Vladimir Putin started this war. . . . He is to blame for what we’re seeing tonight.”
Not everyone on the right sees Putin’s war as a bad thing. Among white nationalists, his anti-liberalism and anti-L.G.B.T. views are widely admired. Nick Fuentes, a leading activist, praised the invasion at the America First Political Action Conference in Florida: “Can we give a round of applause for Russia?” he said, while people in the crowd chanted, “Putin! Putin! Putin!” Two Republican members of Congress, Representatives Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, spoke at the America First event, but this merited only a promise to discuss the matter with them from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Authoritarianism, violence, and fear of others remain at the heart of the modern Republican Party in the United States. Whether the war in Ukraine will bring the party back from its reprehensible extremes remains to be seen. For the good of balance in government and the future of democracy, we deeply hope that it can.