Ruth Ben-Ghiat: How Trump Is Helping Putin

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University and a specialist in autocracy.

She wrote recently on her blog Lucid about some of the ways that Trump is helping Putin achieved his goal of reassembling the whole USSR. Many years ago, Putin said that the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.” some might have said it was World War I or Wotkd War II. Not Putin, veteran KGB agent.

Ben-Ghiat wrote:

To understand the nature and scope of this momentous shift, it helps to think like an autocrat. For this kind of leader, democratic America, with its robust economy, far-reaching infrastructure of foreign aid, immensely powerful military, and checks on foreign malign influence and corruption initiatives, is a huge problem.

Trump’s path back to power so he could take care of this distressing situation was eased by Chinese, Iranian, and Russian disinformation campaigns, which, together with U.S. Republican propaganda, helped to discredit and weaken American democracy in the eyes of the American public. Trump’s ceaseless efforts to praise foreign strongmen and his delegitimization of democratic institutions, from elections to the free press to the judiciary, also had this aim.

Trump had long ago internalized a view of geopolitics that sees democracies, and American democracy in particular, as hostile actors who deny the rights of autocracies to expand their influence in the world. When Trump suggests that President Joe Biden’s support of Ukraine’s bid to join NATO provoked Russia’s invasion, he justifies the Kremlin’s aggressions as a legitimate response to democratic meddling. 

Now that Trump is back in the White House, focused on the destruction of American democracy, we can expect public collaboration with Russia to take several forms. Trump and his enablers in and outside of the GOP will produce a steady stream of performances and propaganda meant for two audiences: autocrats, especially Putin, and the millions of Americans who still need to be indoctrinated to see the world in ways that benefit Trump and his Kremlin ally.

The novel co-presidency of Trump and Elon Musk has provided a one-two punch approach to quickly launch the other two ways the U.S. will collaborate with Russia. First, by erasing or dialing back America’s global soft and hard power footprint in the world. This could mean reducing military spaces abroad that are now deterrents to autocratic aggression, or using such spaces as launching pads for pro-autocratic military engagements that the US may one day participate in.

It also means ending or scaling back humanitarian assistance programs that have created goodwill for America among global populations. Musk has jump-started this latter action by destroying USAID. The goal is to create a vacuum of American power and influence in the world that China, Russia, Turkey and other autocracies can fill.

The second form of collaboration entails the removal of barriers to the free flow of Russian influence inside America. This was supposed to be a priority of Trump’s first administration. Just months after his inauguration, Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office, with only a Russian state photographer from TASS present. This told the world that the White House would be a Russian-friendly space with Trump in power, with Kremlin views of politics and the world amplified by Washington. 

Then came the Russia investigation —a supreme annoyance made possible by the existence of democracy in America. During the recent meeting with Zelensky, Trump evoked the difficulties this investigation created for Russian capture of the United States, tellingly mentioning the toll it took on Putin–and just as tellingly, alluding to the pressures this obstruction of Putin’s plans placed on him as an ally with responsibilities to fulfill. His statement resembles the “self-criticism” Communist operatives were required to engage in when they displeased the regime. 

“Let me tell you. Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He had to suffer through the Russia hoax…He went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt…It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”

This false start, and the heightened expectations for Trump to perform this time, are likely why Trump & Co. have acted so aggressively. In his first weeks in power, Trump signed orders to disband TaskForce KleptoCapture, which targeted Russian oligarchs, disband the FBI’s Foreign Influence Taskforce, and relax enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including digital actions.

The appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, who has a history of taking positions that defend Russian interests, as Director of National Intelligence, is another indication of the will to dismantle obstructions to Russian influence inside America. The walls of the national security fortress are coming down.

In 2018, before the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, Trump said that he saw Russia as more of a “competitor” than an “enemy.” Seven years later, that competitor has become an ally. Whatever forms Russia-U.S. collaboration will take, more Americans will come to understand that the man they elected to “save the country” is far more interested in solving Putin’s problems than in governing America. That means wrecking American democracy at home and dismantling American power abroad.