With President Donald Trump and officials in his administration channeling Kremlin-created narratives on the war in Ukraine, cozying up to Vladimir Putin and opposing a United Nations resolution naming Russia as the aggressor, one may legitimately ask if Trump’s America is now allied with Putin’s Russia. And another long-simmering question comes back with a new urgency: What is it with the American right and Putin?
To some extent, the right wing’s Putin lovefest is simply the result of cultlike fealty to Trump: If he blasted the Putin regime as an evil empire tomorrow, most conservative pundits and “influencers” would follow. But Trump’s evident affection for the Moscow dictator — which doesn’t require conspiratorial explanations like KGB recruitment or blackmail — also lines up with some independently existing trends on the right.
To some extent, the right wing’s Putin lovefest is simply the result of cultlike fealty to Trump.
In an astute analysis, expatriate Russian political strategist Stanislav Belkovsky argued that Trump’s affinity for Putin is explained by several factors: his hatred for the American and European political “establishment” and readiness to see its enemies (including Putin) as allies; his general affection for authoritarian rulers; and grudges over what he sees as his persecution by Democrats over charges of pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine misconduct.
But it’s not just Trump: Plenty of others on the right share some of these attitudes.
Anti-establishment animus, for instance, has long flourished among conservatives — and, almost by definition, among libertarians.
For some, the hostility is directed at America’s “interventionist” global leadership and often accompanied by sympathy for America’s foes abroad. One prominent exponent of such views is former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who, in addition to his GOP presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, actually was the Libertarian Party’s nominee in 1988. Paul was described as “Putin’s new best friend” by Lucia Graves in National Journal at the start of the Ukraine conflict in 2014 for his knee-jerk defenses of Putin and attacks on what Paul referred to as “Western politicians and media.” While his son Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., took a much tougher stance toward Moscow at the time, he has more recently moved into the more pro-Russia camp, even praising what he called Trump’s “message to the Ukrainian warmongers.”
Others see the modern secular West as a den of anti-Christian decadence and readily fall for Putin’s posturing as a champion of traditional and religious values. Back in 2013, right-wing populist Pat Buchanan — whose xenophobic revolt against the GOP establishment in the 1990s foreshadowed Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement — hailed Putin as “one of us” in the culture war against the “new immorality.” For others, the issue is “globalism” or “cancel culture” or distrust of the “mainstream media” — while Putin’s Russia is seen as a stronghold of national sovereignty, an “anti-woke” haven, or a source of alternative narratives.
And for some figures on the right such as Tucker Carlson — who is a leader, not a follower, in the Trumpian right’s pro-Russia drift — all these preoccupations are rolled into one big ball of anti-Western, pro-Russian contrarianism.
Needless to say, Putin’s right-wing fans are untroubled by the contradictions between their ideals and the reality of the Putin regime — a reality in which the “cancellation” of dissenters is often quite literal (see Alexei Navalny or Boris Nemtsov), assaults on Christianity take the form of horrific persecution against Ukrainian evangelical Christians and other Protestants in Russian-occupied territories, and Ukraine’s national sovereignty is trampled in a brutal war of aggression. The regime’s actual values don’t matter as long as they can be a battering ram against “the establishment.”
The role of authoritarianism in the right’s Putin sympathies shouldn’t be discounted either. “National Conservatism,” an intellectual movement launched during Trump’s first term to give Trumpian populism a respectable foundation, is openly contemptuous of liberalism — not only in its left-of-center American political sense, but in a more classical sense that includes the pro-liberty, pro-individual rights conservatism of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.
The role of authoritarianism in the right’s Putin sympathies shouldn’t be discounted.
One author associated with the movement, Christopher Caldwell, offered a gushy valentine to Putin as a “hero to populist conservatives around the world” in a 2017 speech at conservative-leaning Hillsdale College. While acknowledging Putin’s repression of dissent and likely connection to political murders, Caldwell wrote that Putin was an outstanding leader by “traditional measures” such as “the defense of borders and national flourishing.” While these claims look particularly ironic today after the damage Putin’s war has inflicted on Russia, the overt declaration that leaders should be measured by standards that pointedly exclude liberty and respect for human rights is especially startling.
Meanwhile, far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed monarchist who openly advocates for the replacement of liberal democracy with autocracy, has fantasized that the Putin regime will not only conquer Ukraine but reprise Tsarist Russia’s (brief) 19th-century role as the crusher of liberalism in Europe. This crankery would be negligible if Vice President JD Vance hadn’t expressed admiration for Yarvin’s work.
Still, outright Putin love is fairly rare in GOP ranks; the fawning is limited mostly to a small cadre of pundits, too-online influencers and trolls. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that only 18% of Republicans had a favorable opinion of the Russian dictator. But that’s still too high (the comparable numbers for Democrats and independents are 8% and 9%, respectively), and it’s likely this 18% comes from the hardcore, activist part of the “base.” In the same poll, Republicans were the only group in which negative opinions of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dominated: 40% unfavorable to 38% favorable.
Those are dangerous trends. The MAGA-fied GOP may not be in the Putin camp, but it is already leaning toward the anti-Ukraine camp. And this drift is based on misguided devotion to Trump and even more misguided ideas about Russia and the West.
Cathy Young
Cathy Young is a staff writer at The Bulwark and a contributing editor for Reason. Born in Moscow, she writes extensively about Russia and Ukraine.
