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There’s a growing split within the Republican party over withdrawing U.S. military support to prevent Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine from wiping the fragile democracy off the map, an extremely unpopular political position supported by only 26% of Americans.
For the first time since Donald Trump seized party control, fawning support for Russian President Vladimir Putin from Trump and his anti-democratic Republican supporters is finally creating a political backlash from Senate leader Mitch McConnell and other longtime, anti-communist Reagan Republicans.
That widening political chasm burst into view when the three loudest voices in today’s Republican party—Trump, Ron DeSantis and Putin’s favorite Fox broadcaster Tucker Carlson—jointly declared their united opposition to President Biden’s continuing U.S. support to defend Ukraine from Russia’s military destruction.
Carlson, whose pro-Putin commentaries have been broadcast on Russian state television with Russian language subtitles, welcomed the hostility of Trump and DeSantis toward defending the freedom-fighting Ukrainians from Putin’s terrorism.
No Surprise from Trump
Trump was no surprise since he openly supported Putin throughout his presidency. Trump’s first impeachment in 2020 was for illegally withholding $400 million in U.S. military assistance for Ukraine to defend itself from Russia because President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to conduct a fraudulent criminal investigation into Biden’s family as “a favor” to Trump to sabotage Biden’s presidential campaign.
But voters knew very little about Florida Gov. DeSantis’s views on the world, which also turned out to be very little. Responding to Carlson’s questionnaire, DeSantis dismissed Putin’s savage war crimes in Ukraine as “a territorial dispute.” “While the U.S. has many vital national interests …” DeSantis ignorantly opined, “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”
That put Trump and his mini-me imitator DeSantis, currently the two most likely candidates to receive the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, squarely at odds with the overwhelming majority of American voters.
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In January on the first anniversary of Russia’s massive attack on Ukraine’s valiant democracy by one of the largest military powers on earth, only 26% of Americans thought the U.S. was providing too much support for Ukraine with 31% saying the U.S. was providing the right amount of military assistance and another 20% who wanted more American support.
GOP Leaders Finally Speak Up
Belatedly, McConnell and other Republicans are becoming increasingly alarmed about their party’s support for Putin’s Russia. Putin’s criminal invasion of its sovereign democratic neighbor threatens every other democracy in Europe. Russia today is a far greater threat to the entire world than it was in 1983 when Republicans unanimously embraced President Reagan’s definition of Russia as “an evil empire” in “the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
McConnell finally spoke out a month ago condemning anti-democracy Putin sycophants within the Republican party. “Reports about the death of Republican support for strong American leadership in the world have been greatly exaggerated,” McConnell told the Munich Security Conference in Germany. “My party’s leaders overwhelmingly support a strong, involved America and a robust transatlantic alliance. Don’t look at Twitter. Look at people in power.”
Other Republican senators, including many who have long been fearful of openly challenging Trump, reacted negatively to the public opposition to defending Ukraine by Trump and DeSantis without naming them.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a retired Air Force lawyer, tweeted: “To those who believe that Russia’s unprovoked and barbaric invasion of Ukraine is not a priority for the United States – you are missing a lot.”
Disputing the Territorial Dispute
Florida’s cowardly Sen. Marco Rubio didn’t mention Trump but took issue with his own state’s governor. “It’s not a territorial dispute … any more than it would be a territorial dispute if the United States decided it wanted to invade Canada or take over the Bahamas,” Rubio told rightwing talk show host Hugh Hewitt. “This is an invasion” and “a national security issue.”
It’s long overdue for Republicans to speak out against rightwing extremists in America openly siding with Putin against their own democracy, but there’s an obvious flaw in McConnell’s declaration of overwhelming support for Ukraine from the party’s leaders.
There is no effective Republican leadership in the House. When Ukraine President Zelensky’s address to a joint session of Congress in December was interrupted 18 times with bipartisan standing ovations and enthusiastic cheers, most House Republicans boycotted the speech.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was forced to relinquish power to the House Insurrection Caucus that still supports the violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. Many House members are permanently elected in corruptly gerrymandered Republican districts. Unlike Senators elected statewide, they’re free to ignore the majority of Americans.
But Republican presidential candidates aren’t. Going into the 2024 presidential election behind candidates giving a green light to Putin invading and demolishing European democracies is politically reckless.
We’ve yet to see a serious Republican presidential candidate as committed as President Biden is to protecting democracy in America and throughout the world.
