WASHINGTON ― On the wall overlooking the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is a portrait of the 40th president, Ronald Reagan. If it could move, it would likely turn its back in shame at the words and actions this week by the 47th president.
“Absolutely obscene,” said Tom Nichols, a self-described Reaganite and former Naval War College professor, about Trump’s capitulation to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. “He ought to take that picture down.”
Reagan labeled the Soviet Union “the evil empire” for its human rights abuses and expansionist foreign policy. Trump regularly praises Putin as a “strong” leader.
Reagan pushed for freedom for Eastern Europe from Soviet hegemony. Trump victim-blames Ukraine, saying the former Soviet republic brought Putin’s invasion on itself.
Reagan in 1987 stood in Berlin, at the Brandenburg Gate between East and West and, in a speech in a speech that marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, demanded of its final leader: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Trump in 2025, when pressed on whether Putin was mainly responsible for the destruction in Ukraine, answered: “I get tired of listening to that, I’ll tell you what.”
In just a single week, Trump has repeated Putin’s talking points that Ukraine, not Russia, was somehow responsible for Russia’ now three-year-long invasion of its neighbor. He called Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator” while offering kind words for Putin, who has had political opponents and critics murdered. He pushed Ukraine to pay protection money, in the form of handing over mineral rights, if he wants American help going forward. And he has demanded that Ukraine offer several concessions to bring about the end of the war, including giving up territory Putin has seized, while asking nothing of Russia.
Trump justified that approach by arguing that the Russians “have the cards” because they seized Ukrainian land, openly rewarding Putin for his aggression.
And while during his first term Trump’s pro-Putin tendencies were tempered by others in his administration — including national security adviser John Bolton and his own vice president, Mike Pence — those voices are gone now.
Trump’s new national security adviser, Mike Waltz, had as a member of Congress stated that Putin was to blame for the Ukraine war the same way that Al Qaeda was to blame for the Sept. 11, 2021, terrorist attack. Asked this week, Waltz literally “both-sided” the question.
“There has been ongoing fighting on both sides,” he said in a White House press briefing, and went on to defend Trump for calling Zelenskyy a dictator in the same way Republicans have been defending Trump on indefensible words and deeds for going on a decade. “Look, President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelenskyy,” Waltz said, as if describing a cranky toddler who would be fine after a snack and a short nap.
Of course, as appalling as Trump’s siding with a murderous dictator is, it should not come as a surprise.
Trump’s fascination with autocrats generally and Putin in particular has been well documented for more than a decade. In 2013, he posted on social media that his hosting of a beauty pageant in Russia might win him Putin’s approval.
“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” he wrote.
That was followed by years of attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow — an effort that continued straight through his first run for president in 2016, it came out later. Trump asked for Russian help to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton that year, and then knowingly used the hacked and stolen emails that Russian spies released during the final month of the presidential campaign.
Then, as both special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated Russia’s role in his victory, Trump eagerly bought into a conspiracy theory concocted by Russian operatives that — contrary to the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia helped Trump win in 2016 — it was actually Ukraine that had tried to help Clinton win.
Trump sent his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine to collect evidence — an effort that ultimately led to Trump’s attempt to extort Zelenskyy into announcing an investigation into the Democrat he most feared in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, using U.S. military aid as leverage. Trump was ultimately impeached for that act, but the Republican-led Senate declined to remove him from office.
Trump’s personal antagonism toward Zelenskyy, perhaps stemming from that episode, seems to have continued unabated. Three years ago, when Putin first invaded, Trump called it “genius” and “savvy.” This week, in both a social media post and then in prepared remarks delivered to a Miami audience, Trump insulted Zelenskyy as “a modestly successful comedian” who needed to hurry and end the war or face losing his country.
To Nichols, the author of six books about the Soviet Union, Trump is playing with fire. Nichols sees Putin as far more dangerous than any of the Soviet leaders, all of whom had to contend with competing power centers in the Politburo bureaucracy.
“Putin is a thug and an experienced intelligence agent and he knows how to manipulate Trump,” Nichols said.
Be that as it may, Trump seems to have the party formerly of Reagan fully behind him as he abandons Ukraine. At the Conservative Political Action Conference this week — the annual gathering where, in 1974, Reagan gave the keynote speech — House speaker Mike Johnson was asked whether Congress would approve any more U.S. aid to Ukraine, as lawmakers had done under former President Joe Biden.
“There is no appetite for that. What do you think?” Johnson said with a laugh, encouraging the crowd to boo in response. “Uh, no.”
“I guess I’m no longer surprised. It’s not so much a party’s ideological transformation as it is the abandonment of good character and values of any kind as an attribute of statesmanship,” said Mark Salter, a longtime senior aide to former U.S. Sen. John McCain, who famously said in his 2008 presidential run that when he looked into Putin’s eyes, all he could see were the letters “K-G-B.”
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“The GOP is no longer the party of Reagan because so few of its office holders possess a sense of honor that Reagan would recognize as such. It’s a moral rot causing the ideological decay,” Salter added.
The next logical step could well be for Trump to start sending U.S. military assistance to Russia instead, using his same stated rationale of ending the war quickly.
If that sounds outlandishly, over-the-top impossible, so did much of what Americans saw over the past week — right up until it happened.
