Trump-Putin 2024
Plus: Some good takes and some terrible takes on the significance of Alexei Navalny.
Happy Presidents’ Day—a quick missive today, and we’ll let you get back to your holiday.
Hanging Putin Around Trump’s Neck
Not to be a Debbie Downer on Presidents’ Day, but I want to talk about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
In the last few days, Vladimir Putin has murdered Alexei Navalny, and the New York Times has reported that Putin hopes to deploy anti-satellite weapons with nuclear warheads in space that would pose a clear and present danger to us.
And of course Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine is entering its third year. It’s also clear that Putin is a key figure in an axis of anti-American dictators in Iran, China, and North Korea.
We were slow in awakening to the threat of Putin. We have been sluggish in responding to that threat once awakened. But it is the most urgent foreign policy threat we face.
A broad coalition of political forces in the United States, ranging from Mike Pence on the right to Bernie Sanders on the left, is anti-Putin. Against them stand Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, who are pro-Putin.
The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro-Vladimir Putin. This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.
But the political professionals say foreign policy doesn’t matter in elections. Americans vote on the economy. Or immigration. Or abortion rights.
That’s true to some degree. But not as much as we might think—particularly now that the post-Cold War era has ended in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The world we now live in seems more like that of 1972, or 1980, or 1988. In such a world, issues of foreign policy and national security matter in selecting a president. Putin matters.
And American voters know who Putin is. In an August Gallup poll, 95 percent of all Americans had an opinion of the Russian dictator, making him better known than any American politicians other than Biden and Trump. In that poll, Trump was seen favorably by 41 percent of Americans and unfavorably by 55 percent, while Biden’s favorable/unfavorable split was 41 percent to 57 percent.
Putin’s numbers in that poll? 5 percent favorable, 90 percent unfavorable. A YouGov poll last week was a bit rosier: 13 percent in favor of the Russian dictator, 81 percent unfavorable.
It’s actually striking that all the work of the pro-Putin right—from Trump himself to Tucker Carlson—has had so little effect in improving Putin’s image. Putin turns out to be a very hard sell.
Which is all the more reason to hang Putin around Trump’s neck. It could well make Trump a harder sell to some number of swing voters.
Those who seek to save the country from a Trump second term can and should hammer home Trump’s fondness for Putin.
A Bush 1988 campaign operative was quoted as saying that they were going to make the American public believe that Willie Horton, the murderer paroled under a law signed by Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, was Dukakis’s running mate. They did a pretty good job of that. There is far better justification for making Vladimir Putin into Donald Trump’s figurative running mate. Because it’s true: A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin.
—William Kristol
Remembering Alexei Navalny
Hundreds of Russians have been detained while paying tribute to Alexei Navalny following the Friday news of his death, the human rights group OVD-Info reported over the weekend.
The Free Press today published a striking piece of reporting: A sequence of letters exchanged last year between Navalny and the famed Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Navalny had just read Fear No Evil, Sharansky’s memoir of his own time in the gulag, and wrote to Sharansky from prison as an admirer:
I want to thank you for this book as it has helped me a lot and continues to help. . . . Your book gives hope because the similarity between the two systems—the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia—their ideological resemblance, the hypocrisy that serves as the very basis of their existence, and the continuity from the former to the latter—all this guarantees an equally inevitable collapse. . . .
The ‘virus of freedom’ is far from being eradicated. It is no longer tens or hundreds as before, but tens and hundreds of thousands who are not scared to speak out for freedom and against the war, despite the threats. Hundreds of them are in prisons, but I am confident that they will not be broken and they will not give up.
And many of them draw strength and inspiration from your story and your legacy. I am definitely one of them. My thanks to you. Here, I copied it for myself from the book: L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim.
Sharansky replied:
Aleksei, you are not just a dissident—you are a dissident “with a style”! My horror over your poisoning changed to amazement and exhilaration when you started your own independent investigation.
I was very angered by the question of a certain European correspondent the day after your return to Russia. “Why did he return? We all knew that he would be arrested in the airport—does he not understand such simple things?” My answer was pretty rude: “You’re the one who doesn’t understand something. If you think that his goal is survival—then you are right. But his true concern is the fate of his people—and he is telling them: “I am not afraid and you should not be afraid either.”
I wish to you—no matter how hard it may be physically—to maintain your inner freedom.
We say it a lot, but we’ve never meant it more sincerely: Read the whole thing.
Garry Kasparov’s thoughts on Navalny’s death, written Friday morning, are worth your time too:
Putin tried and failed to murder Navalny quickly and secretly with poison, and now he has murdered him slowly and publicly in prison. He was killed for exposing Putin and his mafia as the crooks and thieves they are. My thoughts are with the brave man’s wife and children.
Putin is Navalny’s killer, make no mistake, but there is blame enough to share. First, the Russians who failed to match Alexei’s courage to end Putin’s dictatorship and war. Some of us tried, and he marched with us in numbers that seem a fantasy now. But it wasn’t enough.
My rage and eternal scorn toward the Western politicians who treated Navalny’s poisoning and jailing as just another negotiating point with Putin, as they did the murder of another friend, Boris Nemtsov. Big talk, no action, more blood on their hands.
As with Boris, as with global assassinations, election interference and aid to other murderous dictators, as with Ukraine, and now with Alexei, Putin doesn’t care how it looks or what you say. He only cares about action, and he will not stop killing until he is stopped.
And . . . One More Take
With the South Carolina primary looming this weekend, Nikki Haley savaged both Putin and Trump when news broke of Navalny’s death on Friday: “Putin did this. The same Putin who Donald Trump praises and defends. The same Trump who said, ‘In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that.’”
“Putin murdered his political opponent and Trump hasn’t said a word after he said he would encourage Putin to invade our allies,” Haley added a few hours later. “He has, however, posted 20+ times on social media about his legal drama and fake polls.”
Haley’s words held true for much of the weekend, with Trump posting dozens of times about his golf exploits, the various prosecutors and judges out to get him, and his new sneaker line without ever mentioning Navalny.
On Sunday, however, he finally spotted a take on the dissident’s death that interested him. “Biden:Trump::Putin:Navalny,” he wrote, sharing an editorial from a site called “Tipp Insights” which argued that Trump’s legal trouble was exactly like Putin’s prosecution of Navalny, only worse:
Trump is no Navalny. While the Left continues to treat Trump as Putin treated Navalny, the differences are stark. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States and served in that capacity as the leader of the Free World, engaging in no new wars and presiding over a robust economy.
Navalny was an opposition leader who had repeated problems with Russian law, including being charged multiple times with embezzling state funds. He had been a thorn in Putin’s reign for nearly ten years, accusing various members of Putin’s administration of corruption and fraud, including Putin himself. . . . Like Biden is doing to Trump, Putin returned the favor, employing the levers of government to make Navalny ineligible to run for presidential elections until 2028.
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump himself posted this morning. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”
A response to Trump's Navalny post...
Donald:
You have the right to remain silent. Or to run your mouth like a sewer.
Anything you say can and will be used for or against you in the court of public opinion.
You have the right not to be persecuted for your political beliefs and speech, not to be imprisoned for them, not to be tortured, and not to be murdered like Alexei Navalny.
You have these rights because of the Constitution, which you failed to protect but which you now rely on for your own protection as a criminal defendant, and because of the men and women in uniform whom you once commanded and have often belittled, whose service, sacrifice and blood has protected it since long before your toxic, worthless presence in this world became a reality of American life.
You are one of the luckiest people in the world, completely undeserving of the benefits that the luck of your birth on American soil has afforded you. It is my fondest hope that when the day comes that you draw your last breath that as you take it you realize that your whole life has all been for...nothing.
America is not in decline. This is not a failing nation. And there's only so long people will buy a line of bullshit that is so clearly unAmerican. Every day Trump bleats about how much he hates this country increases the chances of people realizing that he really hates this country. So I hope he keeps it up. In the meantime, I'll be out there not declining and not failing. It's our patriotic duty, so I invite you all to not fail and not decline with me. It's the perfect day to say that, unlike Mr. Trump, I love being an American. (And I've paid more taxes than him, too.)