The GOP Putin Cult

[homersapien 11,428]

Today on TAP: House Republicans won’t consider aid to Ukraine because, as a homophobic thug, Putin personifies their values.

by Harold Meyerson

February 13, 2024

By a substantial bipartisan vote (70 to 29), the Senate has now passed and sent to the House the long-touted bill to provide military funding to both Ukraine and Israel. The House, says Speaker Mike Johnson, won’t consider it.

Initially, of course, House Republicans said such a bill had to be linked to more funding for our border with Mexico and to policy changes that would reduce the flow of immigrants and asylum seekers into the U.S. With Democratic mayors and governors loudly noting their own inability to handle the sizable influx of immigrants on their doorsteps, President Biden and most congressional Democrats agreed to compromise border legislation drafted chiefly by Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford. Confronted with the horror of, by their standards, a successful deal with Biden and the Democrats, the House Republicans, egged on by right-wing media, reflexively recoiled, soon to be joined by all but a handful of their Senate counterparts. That leaves them free to oppose the aid to Ukraine per se, which constitutes the lion’s share of the funding that the Senate just authorized.

The main argument Republicans have advanced for opposing the Ukraine aid is that the money would be better spent at the border, though, of course, it’s the selfsame Republicans who have kept that from happening. The more general argument they’ve advanced is that, as the redoubtable Marjorie Taylor Greene has put it, aid to Ukraine “puts America last,” which means “we’re ignoring our own people’s problems.”

But with the exception of more funding for a bigger, better border wall, it’s nearly impossible to find anything domestic that Republicans actually want to spend money on. The 920-page Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a second Trump administration, which I reviewed in our December print issue, advocates spending boosts for the border and the Pentagon, but cutting back on nearly everything else (their favorite remedy, which pops up in their discussions of dozens of federal policies, is to privatize government programs, beginning with Medicare). Greene may want to spend your tax dollars on anti-missiles targeted to shoot down Jewish space lasers, but it’s hard to find Republican support for other specific policies to which money that could otherwise go to Ukraine can be redirected.

That leaves only the possibility that the Trumpified Republican Party, like Trump himself, actually supports Putin and Putin’s war, either because Putin is a hard-right homophobe (the source of his appeal to Pat Buchanan more than 20 years ago, and to Christian nationalists today) or simply the kind of thug whom Trump wants to emulate (and thus appealing to the GOP’s legions of thug-o-crats). Those appear to be the two dominant schools of thought in Trumpland, though it’s possible, of course, to adhere to both.

[homersapien 11,428]

Putin's Trump Gamble

Russia and the U.S. hold elections this year and, even if the result in the former is a foregone conclusion, whether Vladimir Putin will again have Donald Trump as his American counterpart afterNovember's vote is far less certain.

Saturday marks two years since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine which sparked U.S.-led sanctions on Moscow. Kremlin propagandists have touted their preference for Trump to return to the White House, seeing the Republican primary frontrunner as better serving their interests.

But the messaging from the Kremlin got more mixed when Putin told Russian state media this month he would in fact would prefer Joe Biden to retain the U.S. presidency because he was "predictable."

The interview preceded the death of Alexei Navalny, the most prominent Russian opposition figure in recent years, whose demise Biden has pinned on the Russian leader.

Even before the war Putin started, Biden had called Putin a "killer" so could the Russian leader be serious when he says he prefers the "more experienced" Biden?

"I don't believe for a second Putin really would genuinely prefer Biden over Trump," Brian Taylor, author of The Code of Putinism, told Newsweek. "Trump's and Biden's views on support for Ukraine and the war against Russia are so radically different that Putin would see it in his interest for Trump to return."

"Putin hopes this will happen and I think he believes that if Russia can sustain itself over the next year, and then Trump returns, that he will basically have a free hand in Ukraine," said Taylor, politics professor at Syracuse University, New York.

"That's not necessarily the case in reality, but I think that's how he'll perceive things."

When president, Trump's reported links with Putin were subject to scrutiny and the current GOP primary frontrunner avoided agreeing with U.S. intelligence that the Russian leader had interfered on his behalf during the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has also praised Putin as "smart" and boasted about his good relations with the Russian leader, even claiming without providing details that he could end the war in Ukraine started by Putin within "24 hours."

Challenging NATO

Putin was also likely to be listening when during his presidency, Trump took pot shots at NATO, a theme he revisited on February 10, when he told a rally in South Carolina that Russia could "do whatever the hell they want" to members that did not meet a two percent minimum defense spending commitment.

The positions of Biden and Trump on European security, the transatlantic relationship and the war in Ukraine "are completely different," said Taylor. "One is very, very favorable to Vladimir Putin and the other is not."

"It's in Russia's interest for there to be chaos in the transatlantic relationship and uncertainty about whether the alliance can hang together," Taylor said, "that's what a figure like Trump would bring."

But even if Trump were unable to change the U.S. role in NATO or fails in his White House bid, Putin can still point to questions over the alliance's future as being part of the conversation, said Ken Osgood, history professor at Colorado School of Mines.

For Putin, this is already "the single biggest victory attributable to any Russian leader since 1949," Osgood told Newsweek. "Cracking NATO solidarity has been a goal of every Russian leader since Joseph Stalin."

Kremlin propagandists may have welcomed Trump's victory in 2016 but during his term, he retained many of the policies and sanctions on Moscow started by the Obama administration, suggesting he was not the friend to Russia they had hoped for.

"They (Russia) would welcome Trump of course but they don't have a very successful experience with him," said Oleg Ignatov, senior Russia analyst at Brussels-based NGO, the International Crisis Group. "For them, he was too unpredictable," he told Newsweek. "He promised to restore the relationship with Russia but he failed.

"He's not their dream candidate but in the current environment, for them it would be better to have somebody else in the White House, except Biden," said Ignatov.

Much has changed since Trump's victory which took place two years after Putin seized Crimea in

2014, an illegal annexation that was the forerunner to the full-scale invasion that started two years ago. "In 2016 they wanted more to undermine (Hillary) Clinton than support Trump—there was a bit of revenge and there were no geopolitical stakes in those elections," said Ignatov. "Now the stakes and the situation are totally different."

Russian Election and U.S. Aid

Russians go to the polls starting March 15 in what is expected to be a tightly controlled Potemkin plebiscite likely to hand Putin another six years in the Kremlin.

On the campaign trail, Putin can sell his forces' capture of Avdiivka, in Ukraine's Donetsk oblast, as a military success. Analysts and allies of Kyiv say it highlights the need for further military assistance as a $60 billion package remains deadlocked in U.S. Congress. But Trump's campaign rhetoric to end further U.S. aid is one embraced by some Republicans, which Putin is keenly aware of.

"President Biden for the past two years has been willing to provide Ukraine with assistance, albeit too slowly. President Trump has spent the past two years saying that he could end this war in 24 hours. So of course, Putin is going to prefer the candidate he thinks he can make a better deal with," said Luke Coffey, a Hudson Institute senior fellow.

"Trump would not be willing to provide continued support to Ukraine. Doing so is very unpopular with his base and he likes to see himself as this great dealmaker that's going to solve the biggest conflict since the Second World War," Coffey told Newsweek.

"I can see a situation where if President Trump wins a second term, President Putin will try to go big in Ukraine more than he is now, and then unilaterally pulling back a little bit as a sign of goodwill that President Trump would latch on to, as an opportunity to make a deal between Russia and Ukraine."

Trump will not be thinking of the long-term future of Ukraine or the prospect that a frozen conflict would see Russia try to take the whole of the country in years to come, said Coffey. "As long as he has brokered a deal between Ukraine and Russia and fighting doesn't break out during the rest of his term, he won't care."

However, Putin's boasts about closer ties with China and his vision of a pivot away from the West towards the so-called Global South shows he is not just fixated on the White House.

"We should not overestimate the effects of what happens in foreign countries on Putin's thinking," Konstantin Sonin, a Russian-born economist and Kremlin critic who was charged in absentia in Moscow for spreading "fake news" about the Russian army, told Newsweek. He noted that before his full-scale invasion, "Putin basically stopped listening to everyone, even if what they were saying was extremely plausible."

"I do not think Putin's thinking is affected by what is going on in the United States," he said. Putin wants Trump to be elected and for European governments to be constantly harassed by right-wing politicians, "because this decreases the flow of munitions to Ukraine, so he works on this—but he's not dependent on this," said Sonin, professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Sonin also believes that even if he were to take office, Trump's boundary-pushing rhetoric challenging NATO did not mean he would stop an alliance response under Article 5 in which an attack on one country is considered an attack on all.

"Whatever Trump says now, what he would be saying after, say, five American marines are dead because of a Russian missile in Poland, will be totally different."

 

[I_M4_AU 7,957]

This is why the House should not consider the spending bill; until of course, the border is secure.  By secure I don’t mean letting 5000 illegals enter the country every day.

 

 

[Leftfield 2,646]

11 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

This is why the House should not consider the spending bill; until of course, the border is secure.  By secure I don’t mean letting 5000 illegals enter the country every day.

This is a misrepresentation, as I'm sure you're aware.

And what was proposed is far better than what we have right now.

Your thoughts on Trump admitting that he pressured lawmakers to reject it so it would help him win the election?

 

[I_M4_AU 7,957]

3 minutes ago, Leftfield said:

This is a misrepresentation, as I'm sure you're aware.

And what was proposed is far better than what we have right now.

Your thoughts on Trump admitting that he pressured lawmakers to reject it so it would help him win the election?

 

The whole bill was a misrepresentation of a secured border.  It may be better than what we have now, but it would last well into the future and was unacceptable.  The House passed a bill last May and that is the one that should be taken up by the Senate.  Fat chance that will happen.

Trump, as he often does, get ahead of the narrative and that is what happened this time.  Republicans were not going to accept that bill when they passed one in May of last year and the Senate refused to act.

[Leftfield 2,646]

4 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

The whole bill was a misrepresentation of a secured border.  It may be better than what we have now, but it would last well into the future and was unacceptable.  The House passed a bill last May and that is the one that should be taken up by the Senate.  Fat chance that will happen.

What is your idea of a secured border? How many asylum seekers would be allowed?

Why would what is proposed last well into the future? If Republicans are able to win Congress and Trump gets in, could they not change the laws again? And what happens if the Democrats win control of all, without what the Senate proposed passing? Republicans would be in a far worse position.

 

11 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

Trump, as he often does, get ahead of the narrative and that is what happened this time.  

I love the way you couch it as "getting ahead of the narrative" rather than "showing his ass." Somewhat akin to "whipping up a crowd" instead of "inciting an attack on the Capitol."

[I_M4_AU 7,957]

4 minutes ago, Leftfield said:

What is your idea of a secured border? How many asylum seekers would be allowed?

As little illegal crossings as possible and they would be *got aways*.  Asylum seekers should seek refuge is the first country they come to that is not their own and plead their case.  There is no *right* to enter the US and then claim you are being prosecuted, too much false claims as we see now.

Laws are supposed to be long lasting.  We shouldn’t pass laws that are meant to be changes when the next party gets in power.  Those are reserved for EOs.

9 minutes ago, Leftfield said:

Somewhat akin to "whipping up a crowd" instead of "inciting an attack on the Capitol."

Give it up, talk about a narrative.

[Leftfield 2,646]

7 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

As little illegal crossings as possible and they would be *got aways*.  Asylum seekers should seek refuge is the first country they come to that is not their own and plead their case.  There is no *right* to enter the US and then claim you are being prosecuted, too much false claims as we see now.

But are these not covered by the Senate legislation? The 5,000 a day number referred to encounters, not people allowed into the country. And unless I read it wrong asylum would not be granted to those who crossed another country to get here.

 

9 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

Laws are supposed to be long lasting.  We shouldn’t pass laws that are meant to be changes when the next party gets in power.  Those are reserved for EOs.

Do you agree with Biden's consideration to issue an EO to implement what the Senate proposed? Or would it be better for the sides to compromise now? Do you agree with Johnson not even allowing it to be voted on?

 

13 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

Give it up, talk about a narrative.

Any more than "that's just Trump being Trump?"

[auburnatl1 5,010]

Classic deflection thread - OP was about the Russification of the gop, immediately kidnapped to border-mania (I’m guessing Hunter B was the plan b).

[AUFAN78 3,926]

2 hours ago, auburnatl1 said:

Classic deflection thread - OP was about the Russification of the gop, immediately kidnapped to border-mania (I’m guessing Hunter B was the plan b).

OP title was The GOP Putin Cult followed by an article floundering in hyperbole. The bulk of the article centered on the border with the author trying unsuccessfully to tie it to  GOP support of Putin's war. It was a mess. Not surprisingly Homey admired and bought the rhetoric. BTW, no mention of HB. 

[homersapien 11,428]

14 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

OP title was The GOP Putin Cult followed by an article floundering in hyperbole. The bulk of the article centered on the border with the author trying unsuccessfully to tie it to  GOP support of Putin's war. It was a mess. Not surprisingly Homey admired and bought the rhetoric. BTW, no mention of HB. 

As if it wasn't the Republicans who insisted on tying Ukraine aid to the border.     And that's not "rhetoric", it's fact.

And Trump didn't want them to address either one, because 1) he hates Ukraine (and loves Putin) and 2) wants to use the border as an election issue.

Not surprisingly, you're too much of a cultist to face the truth.

 

Edited February 25 by homersapien

[AUFAN78 3,926]

7 hours ago, homersapien said:

As if it wasn't the Republicans who insisted on tying Ukraine aid to the border.     And that's not "rhetoric", it's fact.

You left off the most substantial part, the border piece of the bill sucked. 

7 hours ago, homersapien said:

And Trump didn't want them to address either one, because 1) he hates Ukraine (and loves Putin) and 2) wants to use the border as an election issue.

Some true some hyperbole. 

 

7 hours ago, homersapien said:

Not surprisingly, you're too much of a cultist to face the truth.

You wouldn't know the truth if it hit you in the face. One of us is a cultist and it's not me. 

[homersapien 11,428]

8 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

You left off the most substantial part, the border piece of the bill sucked. 

 

1. LOL!  That was my point.  Why tie the border to Ukraine aid?  That's no way to run a country.

2. And that's not what the Republicans who voted for the bill say.  So that's either a lie - or your cultish fantasy.

[AUFAN78 3,926]

6 hours ago, homersapien said:

1. LOL!  That was my point.  Why tie the border to Ukraine aid?  That's no way to run a country.

2. And that's not what the Republicans who voted for the bill say.  So that's either a lie - or your cultish fantasy.

I'm not sure you had a point.  America first.   

Was that like 3 of them?  

[CoffeeTiger 5,165]

17 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

You left off the most substantial part, the border piece of the bill sucked. 

Some true some hyperbole. 

 

You wouldn't know the truth if it hit you in the face. One of us is a cultist and it's not me. 

The border patrol union, which like the police unions are very Conservative politically and supported Trump in 2020, liked and supported the border deal. 

 

[AUFAN78 3,926]

Just now, CoffeeTiger said:

The border patrol union, which like the police unions are very Conservative politically and supported Trump in 2020, liked and supported the border deal. 

 

And?

[CoffeeTiger 5,165]

3 minutes ago, AUFAN78 said:

And?

That the people who actually defends the borders, deals with the immigrants, and wants a strong border themselves liked what the border deal had to offer. 

 

I take their word for it over Trump and right wing media talking heads

[AUFAN78 3,926]

3 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

That the people who actually defends the borders, deals with the immigrants, and wants a strong border themselves liked what the border deal had to offer. 

 

I take their word for it over Trump and right wing media talking heads

On that, I have no doubt. 

[auburnatl1 5,010]

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/videos/world/2024/02/26/zelensky-sot-donald-trump-ukraine-russia-war-collins-vpx.cnn

[AUFAN78 3,926]

1 hour ago, auburnatl1 said:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/videos/world/2024/02/26/zelensky-sot-donald-trump-ukraine-russia-war-collins-vpx.cnn