Why Does the GOP Support Putin?

The answer isn’t complicated.

Image: Kremlin.Ru, CC.

The Republican Party loves it some Putin. Trump, the GOP’s bloviating orange personality cult figure, constantly blathers about how much he loves Russia’s murderous dictator. Republican leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene (of Jewish space laser fame) and helmet-haired Nazi propaganda broadcaster Tucker Carlson regularly follow the party leader and praise Putin’s plots and rhetoric.  Republicans in Congress have successfully held up aid to Ukraine, the country Putin invaded in 2022.

The GOP’s embrace of Russian goals and Russian disinformation has led bewildered and enraged Democrats (and sometimes even Republicans) to suggest that Putin is directly paying Trump, or at least blackmailing him.

Trump is Trump, which means that he could be guilty of just about anything. But we were reminded yesterday once again that you don’t really need to posit money or extortion to explain the GOP’s love affair with Russia’s thuggish leader.

Russia and the GOP collude to expand their power

This week we learned that FBI informant Alexander Smirnov had falsely accused President Joe Biden of being involved in a bribery scheme connected to his son Hunter and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. This completely false accusation became central to GOP efforts to smear and impeach Biden over the last six years, going back before Biden’s 2020 election victory. Smirnov further admitted that the Burisma story was planted by Russian intelligence. Prosecutors said that Smirnov had been in constant, frequent, and recent contact with Russian officials.

This is shocking news. But it’s also in line with what we know about Trump and the GOP’s use of, and reliance on, Russian propaganda. Russia interfered in the 2016 election in an effort to boost Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton; they may have been responsible for hacks of Democratic National Committee emails, which drove numerous news cycles and damaged Clinton’s campaign.

In 2019, Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, leading to Trump’s first impeachment. The Biden (non) scandal here, we now know, was actively fomented by Russian intelligence. Trump also, throughout his presidency, pushed the Russian disinformation that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.

Trump has, in short, used Putin’s propaganda as his comms network. Trump does do advertising on television and the internet and so forth, like most politicians. But his not-so-secret weapon, the ace stapled to his forehead, is Russian disinformation. Putin hacks and smears Trump’s enemies. And in return Trump and the GOP praise Putin and promise to block Ukraine aid and undermine NATO. It’s not bribery or blackmail. It’s quid pro quo.

You can’t say that in the New York Times

Again, the GOP strategy of outsourcing their campaign to Russia isn’t exactly a secret. Trump openly called for Russian aid in 2016. At a news conference in July of the campaign he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails [from Clinton’s server] that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

The Mueller Report is unambiguous, despite Republican efforts to undermine it. We now know that the GOP was literally laundering Russian disinformation. You don’t have to be a genius to connect the dots.

And yet, mainstream media is reluctant to draw the picture. Even when talking heads denounce the GOP’s newfound love of Russia, they don’t generally explain that that love is a pretty transparent transaction. The GOP boosts Russia and fascist authoritarianism in Europe, Putin boosts the GOP and fascist authoritarianism in the US.

Part of the problem may be that the quid pro quo is so open. Payoffs or blackmail would be something you could dig for. But Trump asking Russia to kneecap his political opponents on live TV just seems too extravagantly egregious to credit. It’s like Poe’s purloined letter; where you just hide the corruption and treasonous fuckery in plain sight.

In addition, Trump has once again managed to hack the journalistic instinct for neutrality and fair play. Much of the mainstream press wants to look even-handed, which means treating the accusations of Biden as if they are in good faith and need serious investigation. Admitting that Trump is using Putin’s propaganda to smear Biden would mean admitting that we’re not dealing here with dueling accusations. We are dealing with a candidate and a party that have entirely abandoned democracy and are relying on a foreign power to corrupt elections. To acknowledge as much would be to say that the GOP campaign apparatus is, and has been for years, borderline treasonous. That’s hard to both sides.

But while cable news is shy about this, there’s no reason the rest of us should be. The scandal here isn’t that the GOP was fooled by a Russian intelligence operative. The scandal is that large swathes of the GOP, led by Trump, are knowingly working with Russia to corrupt US democracy in return for handing Putin as much of Europe as he wants. It’s neither bribes nor blackmail, but a marriage of convenience between domestic and foreign fascists. We beat that alliance in 2020. We better do it again in 2024, for Ukraine’s sake, and for our own.