A Fool and a Tool: Trump Is Spreading Russian Disinformation
Three years after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump is not just siding with Putin, he’s circulating Putin’s lies.
IN MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF MY GRANDFATHER—a jovial, whip-smart Polish immigrant who loved Budweiser—I am a toddler, sitting on his lap while a party swirls around us. He lectures me about the virtues of the United States, his adopted country, a democracy that took him in after he and his family had spent a dozen years as stateless people, first as prisoners in a Soviet labor camp near the Arctic Circle and later as refugees displaced by the Second World War. Once here, in just a few short years he went from working in a factory to building a successful business and living the American dream. There on his lap, I don’t know any of this and mostly just want to get back to playing with my cousin. But before I can squirm away, he reminds me, “You can do anything in America, Nina. You can even be president.”
Today another war ravages the part of Europe where he was born—but this time, the U.S. president allies himself with the country that imprisoned my family and millions like them and that still jails and murders its enemies today. I do not need to wonder what my grandfather, were he alive today, would think of our current government. I know he would be disgusted, because more distasteful than President Donald Trump’s incessant lying is what the lies indicate: After years of yelling that the “Russia hoax” was a witch hunt, Trump is now openly colluding with Vladimir Putin in both narrative and action. Not only is the U.S. government seemingly abandoning its allies, but it is aligning itself with autocrats and oligarchs and attempting to rebuild our country in their image.
Trump’s behavior does not surprise me. In addition to my family connections to the region, I have lived and worked in Ukraine, including in 2016, when, the day after the U.S. election, I overheard an older Ukrainian woman tell someone that “the Americans have sold us to the highest bidder.” I reported on President Zelensky’s historic election campaign in 2019 and have returned to the country several times since the full-scale invasion. Trump has never visited the country, either as president or as a private citizen. Had he done so, perhaps he would not have swallowed the Russian lies about Zelensky he regurgitated last week: “You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it. . . . You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
This narrative is exactly opposite to the facts. Here’s the truth: Three years ago today, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched an unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine that it had been readying for months. Russia had been waging war in Ukraine’s east since 2014—a war that by 2022 had already claimed more than 14,000 lives. Ukraine engaged in multiple attempts at peace talks with Russia over the years, and even put forward a ten-point peace plan in late 2022, which dozens of countries—including the G7, of which the United States is a member—support.
It is not Ukraine that refused to make “a deal,” but Russia. Trump was parroting the Russian worldview, echoing narratives that Russian media, Russian politicians, and Russian trolls have repeated for the past eleven years.
Later, Trump lied about Zelensky’s support among the Ukrainian population, claiming the Ukrainian politician was “very low in Ukrainian polls” and a “dictator.” Zelensky won election in 2019 with a landslide 73.3 percent of the vote, a number that Trump himself could never reach. The Ukrainian president still maintains a 57 percent approval rating, 12 points higher than Trump’s. It’s a stunning number for a leader who has had to oversee three years of all-out war, a mandatory military mobilization of men over 25, rolling power cuts due to Russia’s targeting of the energy grid, and other unpopular policies. His five-year-term was set to expire last year, but in a country being hit with cruise missiles and kamikaze drones on the regular, with many Ukrainians mobilized or temporarily living abroad, and with almost a fifth of its territory under foreign occupation, it is difficult, if not impossible, to hold free and fair elections—not to mention illegal under the Ukrainian constitution.
Then, of course, there’s the intellectual dishonesty of the whole display. Trump led an insurrection after he lost the 2020 election. While feigning concern about the Ukrainian democratic process, he sides with Putin, a man who has brazenly rigged elections in Russia since 2000.
TRUMP’S REPETITION OF RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION is not a mistake; it’s a clear signal that he is aligning the United States with Putin and other autocrats around the world. Along with the illegal dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the freeze of America’s foreign aid programs—both objects of longstanding Russian ire—as well as the ingratiation of wealthy technology executives with the administration, Trump is making clear that the United States and its influence can be bought, just as the Ukrainian woman I overheard in 2016 predicted.
The world has been told over and over again that Trump is a businessman, so we should expect him to conduct his foreign and domestic policy like a business. But he is a businessman who has made terrible decisions and lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of his career. To set up his latest bad deal, he’s put Ukrainian and American democracy on the table.
Last week in Riyadh, Russian officials reportedly told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that U.S. companies had lost more than $300 billion after they left Russia, and that the Kremlin would be happy to arrange lucrative concessions on rare earth minerals and Arctic access for the United States if Moscow gets what it wants in Ukraine. Of course, it’s not average Americans who will see a boon from any of these agreements; the windfall will go to Trump, Musk (whose Tesla EV motors require rare earth minerals for magnets in their motors), and the broader broligarchy.
There’s a reason we have not historically run the government like a business; all the things that make the United States a great place for making money are things that can’t be quantified on a balance sheet. The most pro-American businessman I ever knew, my grandfather, would say that the price of Trump’s support for a Russian peace deal in Ukraine—abandoning the commitment to freedom, democracy, equality, sovereignty, and liberty that the United States has stood for since the end of the Second World War—is too high.
This time around, Trump’s repetition of Russian falsehoods isn’t just another aberration or eccentricity. It’s an indication of the type of country he intends to run, and that country looks a lot more like Russia than the United States of America.
Nina Jankowicz is CEO of the American Sunlight Project and the author of How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2020) and How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back (Bloomsbury, 2022). Find her newsletter at NinaJankowicz.com.
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