What's up with Trump and Russia?

For some in the GOP, Russia is a Giant Cold Florida, where woke goes to die

Two Ohio Trump supporters in 2018, c/o Cleveland.com

Yesterday’s stunning exchange between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signaled a blatant, predictable-but-shocking U.S. alliance with Russia and support for its invasion of Ukraine, and earned the U.S. widespread reprobation from Europe and Canada. It’s not a particularly popular move in the U.S., either. So it’s worth pausing at this point to ask, why did Trump do it? Just what is it with Trump and Russia?

This is not a recent switch on Trump’s part. He has advocated for Russia for years, often over the wishes of many in his party, and allowed Russian officials unusual access to U.S. intelligence. It’s worth recalling that he was impeached in 2020 for attempting to blackmail Ukraine and hold up its military defenses against Russia in order to produce dirt on Joe Biden. Why does he do this even though it’s clearly politically costly?

Obviously, this is a complex question, and there are a lot of moving parts. And I don’t claim to be an expert in this area of politics. (The last time I took an international relations class the Soviet Union still existed.) But at least part of this is financial: Trump was aided by Russian investors in the 1990s and early 2000s when his empire was in considerable financial trouble. At least some of it is personal: Trump has an affinity for Vladimir Putin, praising him numerous times as “smart” and “a genius” and “tough,” and indeed praising many authoritarian leaders along similar lines. He admires the leadership style. And some of it is political: Russia intervened in the 2016 election to Trump’s advantage, although this was likely not determinative of the outcome.

But what we tend to leave out is the ideological motivation, and I believe this is important. There’s a faction on the American right that has a deep affinity for Russia. It’s a subset of the conservative populist wing in which Trump is located. Bulwark writer Cathy Young has a very good piece on just what those ideological underpinnings are. But here’s the quick version:

Russia has been elevated in this faction of the right because it is deeply committed to the same sets of cultural causes. Whatever “woke” means — gay rights, cancel culture, racial tolerance, etc. — Russia is fighting against it. Think of Russia as a Giant Cold Florida, pushing back at the cultural liberalism of the West. As Young writes, those in this ideological wing

see the modern secular West as a den of anti-Christian decadence and readily fall for Putin’s posturing as a champion of traditional and religious values. Back in 2013, right-wing populist Pat Buchanan — whose xenophobic revolt against the GOP establishment in the 1990s foreshadowed Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement — hailed Putin as “one of us” in the culture war against the “new immorality.” For others, the issue is “globalism” or “cancel culture” or distrust of the “mainstream media” — while Putin’s Russia is seen as a stronghold of national sovereignty, an “anti-woke” haven, or a source of alternative narratives.

And for some figures on the right such as Tucker Carlson — who is a leader, not a follower, in the Trumpian right’s pro-Russia drift — all these preoccupations are rolled into one big ball of anti-Western, pro-Russian contrarianism.

It is striking to see the hard right — those who were among the most ardent critics of the Soviet Union — finding allyship among Russians today. But this is less of a journey for some than is generally imagined. In

John Ganz

’s recent book When the Clock Broke, he includes a fascinating paragraph showing the links between David Duke (the KKK leader, Louisiana state legislator and Republican candidate for Senate and governor) and Russia in the early 1990s. I’ll paste it here in its entirety:

The nationalist Russian newspaper Dyen published an interview with David Duke in an issue calling for a “National Salvation Front,” a red-brown alliance of extreme left and extreme right to oppose Boris Yeltsin and replace him with a strongman. “I want Russia to be a strong power, a stronghold between East and West,” Duke told the reporter Vladimir Bondarenko. “In my opinion, the destruction of white Russia would be a great explosion for all of Europe. It would be the end of the European blood heritage. If Russia is destroyed, all of us—including Americans—will be destroyed.” Asked if he supported the paper’s proposal to replace [Russian leader Boris] Yeltsin’s “treacherous” government with a “white general,” Duke replied, “Undoubtedly I will support a man or a party in Russia who will help Russians become strong. I don’t care if they follow certain articles of the constitution or not. I think Russia needs a strong personality in order to overcome all the difficulties.” NPR interviewed the editor of Dyen alongside an aide who was wearing a David Duke button: “The Soviet Union will be restored. It will be called maybe something else. It won’t be socialist Soviet Union. It won’t be the Russian empire, but a great state and this territory will inevitably rise. I want to turn the will of history back. I want to see Russia, that great mighty nation that I saw in my youth.” Shortly after the issue came out, Yeltsin declared the National Salvation Front unconstitutional and banned it. In February, a Constitutional Court ruling reversed Yeltsin’s ban. Seven months later, the National Salvation Front were central players in a coup attempt to overthrow Yeltsin.

There’s a lot in that paragraph, but let’s look at the key elements:

• One of America’s most prominent racist conservative politicians saw Russia as a cultural ally.

• He wanted to see Russia have a stronger leader, even if that meant undermining its fledgling constitutional democracy.

• Duke’s ally in Russia advocated for reclaiming the USSR’s boundaries.

• Russia’s leader tried to ban this movement to keep it from undermining democracy.

• The movement attempted a coup.

Ganz obviously includes this item for its modern poignancy, and rightly so. I wouldn’t say David Duke was a particularly representative example of a Republican politician in 1991 (indeed, the RNC censured him), and he was always at least as much of a huckster as a racist. But the conservative populist wing of the GOP has definitely moved in that direction in the years since. And what this episode reminds us of is the powerful relationship between racial animus, the desire for a strong leader, and democratic decline.