The whole world is grieving and reeling from tragic footage of Russian airstrikes and invasions into Ukraine, and the idea of an avoidable war, that is, apart from former President Donald Trump. As The New York Times writes, as Russia prepared to strike Ukraine and the United States rushed to defend neighboring allies in Europe, former President Trump had “nothing but admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.”
At a fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort on February 23rd, Trump dubbed Putin as “pretty smart,” referring to the the impending invasion like a real estate deal. (A continually devastating invasion in which innocent Ukranian lives were lost and others suffer from life-threatening injuries, including children, as Al-Jazeera reports). “He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,” Trump said, “taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.”
Historians were appalled by his comments, including Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The idea that a former president would praise the man or leadership who American troops are even now traveling to confront and contain,” said Engel, “is astounding.”
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As further explained by The New York Times, foreign policy experts and Russia scholars said Trump’s “apparent sympathy or ambivalence toward Moscow” from elements of the right “raised questions about the influence Trump continues to exert over candidates seeking to tap into his base, the legacy of a decade-old effort by the Kremlin to court American conservatives and the future of the G.O.P.” amid a backlash against the “Republican-led entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Cold War-era Republicans, as historians said to The Times, would have “repudiated comments like Trump’s as un-American.” In an email with the publication, Anders Stephanson, a historian of foreign policy at Columbia University, looked back to an earlier Russian invasion. “Could one imagine Dwight Eisenhower praising Leonid Brezhnev for invading Czechoslovakia in 1968?” he asked in the email. “I think not.”
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Earlier this week, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Trump said in a radio interview, “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius,’ ” he continued. “Putin declares a big portion of of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’”
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On the morning of February 24th, hours after Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden addressed the situation. He dubbed the invasion as a “premeditated attack” planned for months in advance by Putin. “Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way. The world will hold Russia accountable,” the Biden administration said in a statement on that day.
Another key point Biden made in his address is that Putin “has much larger ambitions than Ukraine.” He went on to say, “[Putin] wants to, in fact, reestablish the former Soviet Union. That’s what this is about.” Biden was asked by a reporter about Putin’s potential nuclear threats, and the president then said, “I have no idea what he’s threatening […] I know what he has done.”
In a telephone interview with Fox News later that night, Trump called the unfolding events surrounding the Ukraine tragedy a “very sad thing for the world and the country” before focusing on Biden, and saying he “hadn’t done enough” to prevent Putin from invading. “He was going to be satisfied with a piece and now he sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity of this administration,” Trump continued (although, of course, still never acknowledging the devastation Putin caused, previously saying Putin would “go in and be a peacekeeper.”)
