At a time when Donald Trump’s party is struggling to hold both houses of Congress and his own approval ratings are cratering to historic lows, the President has been campaigning hard all week against . . . Volodymyr Zelensky. Yes, Trump’s October preëlection surprise is that he’s finally decided to begin openly helping Vladimir Putin in Russia’s war of conquest against Ukraine.
The latest twist in Trump’s years-long flirtation with outright support of the Russian war effort began last Friday, after the President held a lengthy call with Putin and announced that he was waiving energy sanctions on Russia to purchase hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel fuel—in an attempt, though likely a pointless one, to bring down surging prices in the U.S. owing largely to the war in the Middle East that Trump himself unleashed. At the same time, he began a drumbeat of accusations against Zelensky, blaming him and not Russia for the ongoing war, demanding that Ukraine stop attacking Russian energy facilities, and even calling for the Ukrainian President’s ouster. “He wants to make problems for the world,” Trump insisted of Zelensky. “I suggest they get a new leader.”
Over the weekend, the President proclaimed an “ENERGY CEASE FIRE” between the two countries, but it appeared to have been entirely made up, and Russia launched deadly new bombardments within hours, leading no less than Laura Loomer, the White House-adjacent conspiracy theorist who used to be a reliably pro-Kremlin voice but recently switched sides after a trip to Ukraine, to conclude, “Vladimir Putin is trying to humiliate the Trump administration.”
Trump, seemingly ever immune to humiliation when it comes to Putin, has not backed off, and the result is that, nearly a week later, he has created the most serious blowup yet of his Presidency with both Ukraine and the rest of the Western alliance. By Wednesday, after U.S.-supplied Starlink satellite service temporarily went down in advance of another large-scale Russian attack, Zelensky spoke publicly of the rift as all but a permanent break. Ukraine is “losing a strong partner,” he told the British television host Piers Morgan. “It’s painful when President Trump chooses one side, not our side.” That same day, in a defiant interview with the Financial Times, he said Ukraine had voluntarily abided by Trump’s energy ceasefire for three days but would not anymore despite U.S. threats to cut off intelligence sharing if the strikes continued. “We’re done,” he said.
This is not the first time Trump has tried to break with Ukraine. Who, after all, can forget the Oval Office confrontation with Zelensky in February of last year, when Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance pushed him to cave in to their demands for Ukrainian territorial concessions as Trump ranted, “You don’t have the cards!”
But timing is everything, in war as in midterm elections, and the moment is particularly risky as Trump’s envoys are again privately pressing Kyiv to agree to a deal that looks more like a surrender on Russia’s terms than a compromise, while Russia, having failed to achieve a battlefield victory despite an estimated 1.4 million casualties, has dramatically escalated its drone and missile attacks on Ukraine.
“The moment of greatest danger is now, in the near term,” Daniel Fried, a former senior U.S. diplomat in Europe, told me. He had just returned from meetings with security officials in Poland and Romania and was more concerned than ever not only about Ukraine’s situation but about an accelerated and intensified campaign of probing attacks by Russia against European allies as well. “That’s what bothers me: Putin knows this, and he will take advantage of it,” Fried said. “The short-term risk is right now.”
One question is whether there is anyone in Washington who can or will do anything about it, given Trump’s expansive views of his own powers and his indifference to what Congress thinks—even when it’s controlled by his own party. “It’s a bitter, forceful reminder that Trump’s worst instincts to believe Putin and to care about what Putin says just keep winning out,” Chris Coons, the senator from Delaware, said. When we spoke on Thursday, Coons, who is in line to become the next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee if Democrats take the Senate, recalled how much effort had gone into persuading Trump to sign a tough new Russia-sanctions bill, which was passed by a huge bipartisan congressional majority only a month ago and named in honor of the late Lindsey Graham, the one Republican senator with Trump’s ear who consistently pushed him to back Kyiv.
Now Trump has in effect blown up what had been his own Ukraine strategy, repeating a pattern that has recurred with depressing familiarity over the past decade, in which he will take some tentative step to aid Kyiv only to speak with Putin and revert to his default setting of tilting toward Moscow. “Is this a break that can be fixed with our European allies?” Coons asked me, before answering his own question. “Not as long as Trump is President.” He expects more weeks like this to come as Trump enters the lame-duck phase of his Presidency. “The damage he can do in the next two years is being underestimated,” he added.
Trump has pivoted to Putin so many times before that it should hardly astonish anyone that he did it again. Back in 2016, I attended Trump’s first-ever foreign-policy speech, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where the Russian Ambassador sat in the front row while the candidate plugged “improved relations with Russia” as one of his main goals. (Trump also said in that speech that the U.S. should become more “unpredictable” as a nation. Promises kept!) Anyone who watched Trump’s 2018 Helsinki press conference, or the 2019 impeachment proceedings of the President for attempting to blackmail Zelensky, could have foreseen something like what happened this week. Ever since he came back to office last year, he’s been trying, on and off, to force Zelensky to accept “a settlement that could have been written in the Kremlin,” as his former national-security adviser John Bolton once put it. So, no, it’s not a surprise.
But these crises that Trump provokes with such regularity always manage to reveal something new, and this one has been no exception, showing a President so politically cornered by the consequences of his war in the Middle East that he turned to Putin to help him out with less than three weeks to go before the midterm elections.
To say that this has not gone over well as a matter of politics would be an understatement.
“Trump supports the Dictator Putin and opposes Ukraine who wants our freedom and Independence,” one Republican congressman, Don Bacon of Nebraska, posted on X. As the week went on, Bacon also compared Trump to Neville Chamberlain, called his policy “appeasement,” and said, “Putin is playing President Trump like never seen before.” Six G.O.P. senators complained in a letter to Trump that his diesel deal with Russia was “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it a “moral and strategic mistake”—a lament quickly circulated on social media by Trump’s first-term Vice-President, Mike Pence. “Enough is enough,” Pence said. And this was just the reaction from Republicans.
Their pushback reflects a political reality: despite Trump’s years of plumping for Putin, the Russian leader and his war remain deeply unpopular in the United States—even more unpopular than Trump himself, which is saying something. A new Fox News survey this week had Trump at his lowest level ever for the network, with a thirty-six-per-cent job approval; seventy per cent of Americans now believe he is doing a bad job on the economy. No wonder. A headline in the Times the other day summed up what can only be imagined as a Republican political consultant’s vision of hell nineteen days before the election: “Soaring Energy Prices Push Inflation Higher.”
In attacking Zelensky with renewed vigor all week, Trump seems to think he’s creating a scapegoat. That is the theory of Angela Stent, a leading Russia scholar who served as national-intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia during the Bush Administration. “Trump is preparing the ground to blame Zelensky if the Republicans do badly in the midterms,” she told me. “That’s the main reason he is doing this now. If diesel prices don’t come down much, he will say it’s Ukraine’s fault and that Zelensky has to go.”
No doubt there’s something to it. Trump is nothing if not a world-class blame-shifter. But demanding that Ukraine fire Zelensky is hardly the rallying cry that Americans are looking for in this season of our own discontent. Trump, even in his Truth Social bubble, must know that. He is certainly aware by now that no amount of Russian diesel fuel, if it ever gets here at all, will reach the U.S. in time to save him before November 3rd. All of which raises an even more worrisome possibility: What if Trump is pivoting to Putin not to help his party to win but because he really wants Russia to? ♦