Republicans’ remarkable shift on Ukraine
The Right often realigns itself with Trump. It will probably fall in line again.
There has been some big news in the polling/data journalism industry this week - ABC News has very abruptly ended 538 and deleted all the past work, and a high-quality polling shop, the Monmouth University poll, has shuttered. The 538 thing is quite similar to what happened with Pollster in 2017 - corporate overlords laid people off (and had encouraged me to leave when I had a job offer prior to the layoffs, which told me my name was on the list - I took the hint) to save money and killed a huge service that should have been easily monetized. I will have more to say on this in my next column.
Back to this week, I wrote about how much Republican public opinion follows Trump around, and has since 2016. The result is a party that has shifted away from traditional conservatism into something else entirely. Whether that is good or bad depends on your perspective, but it’s undeniably changed everything in U.S. politics. Former international hawks have become isolationists - already shaping opinion on Ukraine and Russia, and I fully expect that to shift more in light of recent events.
After I published, the GOP firm Echelon Insights posted some really interesting numbers asking Republicans whether they agreed more with the traditional conservative view or the “new right” view on issues. I was at dinner with a friend on Wednesday night, and we played a guessing game on these numbers. I got some right and some wrong. Also interesting - their trend line on whether Republicans consider themselves more dedicated to the party or Trump. It’s easy to forget that there was some doubt in 2022 and 2023 that Trump would be the nominee in 2024.
Read my column here, and I’ll see you next week.
The Trump presidency has strongly suggested that Ukraine give up its territory currently occupied by Russia’s military. I suggest that the former party relinquish territory it holds outside of the continental United States before it expects/asks Ukrainians to relinquish to Putin’s Russia a sizeable chunk of territory that actually belongs to Ukraine.
(China has similarly suggested that Ukraine let go of the occupied territory as part of a permanent ceasefire settlement/deal with Russia. Perhaps China should give up on Taiwan, which is an independent nation, before it asks Ukrainians to sacrifice territory that actually belongs to them.)
Nah, the U.S. (and China) won't be doing that. They even likely wouldn't give up any territory if they were in Ukraine's situation. That's for suckers.
As for Russia, Putin pathetically hypocritically criticizes then punishes Ukraine's people when the latter's military dares to strike back against Russia's campaign of deliberate targeting and killing of civilians and destruction of infrastructure with barrages of missiles or drones. According to his own words, Putin is astonished and angry, as though the Ukrainians really have no moral right to self-defense!
Of course, Putin will absurdly justify its first-strike attacks against Ukrainian civilians as a necessity of ‘de-nazifying’ their democratically elected government. But he should first ‘de-nazify' Russia's Kremlin — and especially his own presidency! Notably, the far-right AfD party of Germany supports, or at least sympathizes with, Putin's Russia, and vice versa. (Or are they simply each other's Useful Idiot?)
It's utterly naive to think that fascistic conduct is somehow less offensive if its perpetrator is not externally considered to be or tagged by the West as "neo Nazi".
Nevertheless, it all reveals a great yet misplaced sense of entitlement held by Putin’s Russia. And China and definitely Trump's America. They indeed are the high-school bully whose concept of his fair share is always three-quarters of the pie. Also worrisome for the little guy is when the bully is perfectly fine or even proud of the (very shameful) fact.