As I type this newsletter, continued American aid for Ukraine is in grave doubt. Tucker Carlson is in Moscow to conduct a friendly interview with Vladimir Putin. And we’re receiving reports from the front lines that Russia is advancing, in part because of Ukrainian ammunition shortages. In short, the war is reaching a critical stage, and Ukraine may lose because Republicans are willing to hand authoritarian Russia a historic military victory rather than supply further aid to a democratic ally.
Ronald Reagan isn’t just rolling over in his grave; he may also lurch from it in a fit of incredulous rage. This is a remarkable and potentially catastrophic reversal by a political party that is in a state of near-total, frequently random ideological transformation.
To explain the intensity of Republican resistance to Ukraine aid, I need to return to a concept I wrote about in November: that of bespoke realities. My friend Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, coined the term, and she wrote that it refers to the “bubble realities” constructed by communities “that operate with their own norms, media, trusted authorities and frameworks of facts.”
Among those who oppose aid to Ukraine, there are certainly several paleoconservatives who object on classic isolationist grounds: It’s not our fight, our support is costly, we might find ourselves inadvertently embroiled in war, and so on. But the mass Republican movement against Ukraine is rooted far less in policy than it is in a particular bespoke reality of the MAGA universe, in which Ukraine is a pernicious villain, Putin is a flawed hero and Russia should have crushed Ukraine long ago.
MAGA Republicans’ hatred and contempt for Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause is shockingly vehement. Candace Owens says she wants to “punch” Zelensky. Donald Trump Jr. calls him an “international welfare queen.” Carlson says he dresses “like the manager of a strip club.” It’s all bizarre and unreasonable. And it all fits the broader MAGA narrative.
While I absolutely believe Trump is in bed with Russia, and has been since the days he got caught using his hotels to help the Russian mafia launder money, the interview you’re talking about is a second hand report that has had its legitimacy called into question. It comes from an interview with a sports reporter that claims he was told by Trump junior while talking with him at a golf course that they get all the funding they need out of Russia. Unfortunately that’s the only source for that claim so it’s pretty weak.
Stronger evidence I would say comes from Trump repeatedly getting loans out of Deutsche Bank when no other banks were willing to touch him at a time when they were also convicted of helping the Russian mafia commit financial crimes as well as finance their operations in countries outside of Russia. I believe at the time those loans were also listed as being secured by a 3rd party whose identity was never revealed. Added on top of that is known members of the Russian mafia literally living one floor below Trump. We know that in part because that’s where the FBI arrested them.