Trump’s affinity for Putin grows more consequential than ever

Washington: In early 2017, US intelligence agencies delivered an unequivocal judgment about why President Vladimir Putin of Russia had ordered a sprawling effort to sabotage the recent American presidential election.

Putin wanted to cripple the faith Americans have in their own elections, they found, and to undermine a United States-led “liberal world order” that the Russians see as a threat to their security. As a way to achieve this goal, the assessment found, Russia worked to help Donald Trump win the election.

Eight years later, Trump sat in the Oval Office for a blustery meeting with President Voldymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and rendered, once again, his own judgment on that period. There was no Russian sabotage, just a “phony witch hunt” of which both he and Putin were victims.

“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” he said.

The statement was a tell. The president sees common cause with Putin, a merging of interests forged through battles against those he believes are his and Putin’s mutual adversaries — including Democratic lawmakers, European leaders and a spectral “deep state” inside the U.S. government.

The relationship between Trump and Putin has for years been scrutinized by US government inquiries, assessments by foreign intelligence services and news media investigations. Taken together, they have unearthed evidence to support an array of theories addressing Trump’s affinity for a Russian strongman who has spent a career trying to undermine American interests.

As yet, there is no single, tidy explanation. But based solely on Trump’s public actions during his first six weeks back in office, the simple fact is that he has made few decisions on national security or foreign policy that have not been cheered by the Kremlin, making his stance toward Putin more consequential than ever.

This is a world turned upside down for Susan Miller, the former head of counterintelligence at the CIA, who led the agency’s 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian election interference.

Miller said in an interview that she thinks Trump’s affinity for the Russian president boils down to “autocrat envy”— that he covets the power Putin has to make decisions in Russia without any constraints.

“Trump likes Putin because Putin has control over his country,” she said. “And Trump wants control over his country.”

Trump has accused Zelenskyy of beginning the war that started with a Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a war that has seen the mass slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. He has stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine that the country desperately needs to battle Russian forces.

He has gutted US foreign aid programs that Putin has long detested, including pro-democracy programs in countries like Hungary that Russia is bringing closer into its sphere of influence. He has sidelined European allies, saying they are untrustworthy and suggesting they might have to fend for themselves in the future.

Trump has defended his actions in part by saying they are necessary steps to getting Russia to the negotiating table, casting himself as a peace broker to end the war in Ukraine. Thus far, however, he has pushed far harder on Zelenskyy to make concessions than he has on Putin.

On Friday, he began the day with a social media post threatening economic sanctions against Russia for what he said was the “pounding” the Russian military was delivering in Ukraine. In the Oval Office hours later, however, he seemed to defend Putin, saying that Russia “bombing the hell out of Ukraine” was actually a sign that Russia wanted an end to the war. He criticized Ukraine for not, in his view, being as motivated to end the conflict.

“What is Putin getting? He is getting more than he and other former KGB officers ever dreamed of,” said Calder Walton of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who wrote a book on the history of espionage between Russia and the United States.

“This is the dismantling before our eyes of the U.S.-led international order, something that Putin has worked toward his entire career,” he said.

How much does all this please Russian officials? Just ask them.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s longtime spokesperson, went on state television two days after the Oval Office blowup with Zelenskyy and praised the Trump administration’s decisions since coming to power. The new White House agenda, he said, “largely aligns with our vision.”

That same day, Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, presented Russians with a wholly different take on world history than the one that Kremlin officials have taught for decades. Lavrov said it was European nations, not the United States, that were responsible for so many of history’s great tragedies — citing the Crusades, the Napoleonic wars, World War I and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

“If we look at history in retrospect,” he said, “the Americans did not play any instigating, let alone incendiary, role.”

Miller said there was no doubt among members of her counterintelligence team about Russia’s intentions in disrupting the 2016 election: to spread disinformation and sow chaos with the aim of undermining confidence in the democratic process.

At the same time, she said, her agency team — which was joined by officials from the National Security Agency and the FBI — was extremely careful and fiercely nonpartisan in assessing what impact the Russian interference had on Trump’s election victory.

Nevertheless, during the first Trump administration she found herself in the crosshairs of the team of prosecutors led by John Durham, whom Attorney General William Barr had appointed to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation. She said that Durham and other prosecutors grilled her for more than eight hours about the intelligence assessment.

“They were looking for bias in our work,” Miller said. “They didn’t find any.” Durham’s final report found no fault with the 2017 intelligence assessment.

Still, Trump’s anger about what he calls the “Russia hoax” has festered for years, a grievance so deep he now sees Putin as his ally in victimhood.

Putin has spent years trying to shape Trump’s thinking on Ukraine, and there is now little daylight between both men’s public statements about the war.

The first time that Trump and Putin met in person, during a July 2017 summit in Hamburg, Germany, the Russian president used much of the time disparaging Ukraine as a corrupt, fabricated country.

He said that Russia had every right to exert influence over Ukraine. He even justified Russian military operations in the country by raising the historical example of President Theodore Roosevelt’s belief that the United States had the right to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.

Trump is a longtime admirer of Roosevelt.

Leaving the meeting, Rex Tillerson, then the secretary of state, told anxious White House aides that Putin had done his “KGB shtick” and that Trump had not pushed back on any of the Russian president’s assertions about Ukraine.

More than two years later, the House impeached Trump because of a July 2019 phone call he had with Zelenskyy, during which he made continued U.S. military support to Ukraine contingent on Zelenskyy helping dig up dirt on his political opponents.

The episode further radicalized Trump’s views not only toward Ukraine but also to his perceived “deep state” enemies who testified during the impeachment proceedings.

It also began to radicalize other Republicans against Ukraine, who began to echo some of the language that Putin has long used about the country.

This convergence of views has become even more pronounced in the weeks since Trump came back to power, as his administration presses Ukraine to negotiate a peace deal with Russia.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized the conflict in Ukraine on Fox News not as a clear case of Russian aggression, but as a dangerous “proxy war” between the United States and Russia.

Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said in a statement afterward that he agreed entirely. It was, he said, another example of the positions of the White House and the Kremlin aligning “perfectly.”