(CNN) — Americans rarely pay much attention to international events. Busy lives leave little time for distant events with unknown protagonists.
The invasion of Ukraine on the part of Russian President Vladimir Putin has become a rare exception, his carnage in full view through the coverage has come for anyone with a video screen. But Americans may not yet have absorbed this disturbing reality: The US president who left office just 14 months ago has sided with the butcher.
That’s right: In the fight that now unites the free world once morest lawless aggression by an autocrat, the most recent former US president sided with the autocrat.
It’s not just that Donald Trump recently praised the “genius” of Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Since his political career began, Trump has backed Putin in ways directly connected to Russia’s quest to subjugate that country.
For years, relations between Russia and the celebrated real estate executive have been lubricated with money. There was the development funding that Trump’s sons bragged regarding, the Mansión Palm Beach that he sold it to a Russian oligarch for $95 million four years following buying it for $41 million; the Manhattan project in partnership with a mob-linked Russian émigré.
Tried to put a Trump Tower in Moscow even while running for president. In 2013, when he hosted a beauty pageant there, Trump tweeted, “Will (Putin) become my new best friend?”
Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine the next year. The protests in Kyiv forced a Kremlin ally to resign from the presidency. The ousted president, who fled to Russia, had been advised by an American political consultant. That consultant, Paul Manafort, later became Trump’s campaign manager in 2016.
Candidate Trump spoke compassionately regarding Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. He reflected on the lifting of sanctions to smooth relations with Putin.
“The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” dijo Trump a ABC News in July 2016. That had been Putin’s justification for the invasion.
President Trump sought to undo a punishment meted out to Putin by propose that Russia rejoin the G7, an organization of the world’s leading industrial economies. Other members, who had partnered with the US to expel Russia during the presidency of Barack Obama, refused to participate.
His government implemented some new sanctions once morest Russia at the insistence of national security officials and Congress. Trump himself objected.
“In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining and saying we were being too harsh,” his former national security adviser said recently. John Bolton, en Newsmax.
Russia threatened Ukraine during Trump’s term. He strengthened Putin’s hand in several ways.
Trump questioned the America’s decades-long commitment to defending European partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Aides feared he might try to withdraw from NATO if he won a second term.
It fomented discord at home, furthering Putin’s goal of undermining American resolve. “Donald Trump is the first president in my life not trying to unite the American people,” his former defense secretary said in 2020, James Mattis.
Trump shielded Russia from opprobrium. Echoing Russian propaganda, he led his fellow Republicans in defame ukraine by falsely suggesting that Kyiv, rather than Moscow, had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election.
“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” he said. Fiona Hillwho led Russia policy on Trump’s National Security Council, in a congressional impeachment inquiry in 2019.
The Republicans who protect Trump present impeachment as Democratic partisanship. But it goes back to Trump’s alignment with Russia once morest his vulnerable neighbor.
Congress had voted to provide Ukraine with nearly $400 million in military aid. Trump delayed the shipment.
“I’d like you to do us a favor,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his infamous July 2019 phone call.
The favor was for Zelensky to discredit his presidential rival Joe Biden by investigating him and his son, Hunter. Zelensky never delivered.
Things have not turned out the way Trump or Putin wanted.
Trump lost re-election. Biden, who defeated him, is now leading the global effort to stop Putin’s aggression.
Rather than split under military and economic pressure, NATO and the European Union have come together to support Ukraine. Within the United States, the two normally feuding political parties have joined forces to condemn Russian savagery.
Republican senators who voted to acquit Trump of those impeachment charges cheered when Biden criticized the Russian leader in last week’s State of the Union address. A “Putin Accountability Act” sponsored by Republicans in Congress seeks to sanction, among others, the Russian oligarch who more than doubled Trump’s money in that Palm Beach mansion.
Even Trump has changed his tune. A week following praising Putin’s strategic acumen, he denounced Russia’s attack on Ukraine as “a holocaust.”
The ex-president still the leading candidate for the GOP nomination in 2024. But the longer the bloodshed in Ukraine continues, the greater Putin’s responsibility.
Trump and those around him wanted the controversy to go away. His former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who overheard the notorious Trump-Zelensky call, rebuked a reporter who asked regarding Ukraine a few months later.
“Do you think Americans care regarding Ukraine?” Pompeo responded to Mary Louise Kelly of National Public Radio.
They may not have cared then. Unfortunately for Trump, they now care.
