All of this wailing and gnashing of keyboards over how Trump is trying to sabotage President Biden’s re-election prospects by directing his (Trump’s) congressional simps (including a huge cohort of suddenly gelatinous senators) to tank the bipartisan border/immigration deal is overlooking the most glaring beneficiary of such an outcome:
Vladimir Putin
The proposed legislation that all of a sudden is anathema to spineless Republicans includes $109 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
In the movie
Shooter [SPOILER ALERT] a meddlesome priest is assassinated shortly after speaking during a rally with the president of the United States. Everyone (except the plotters) assumes the shooting was a botched attempt on the president’s life, when in fact the priest (an archbishop, actually) was killed because he stood in the way of the evil machinations of a cabal of unsavory people. As one of the plotters says,
[If] you want to take all suspicions away when you shoot someone, wait ‘til he’s standing next to the President.
What is the only thing that has been 100% consistently true about every action that Trump has taken since even before he was in office? Whatever he has done and continues to do — including wreaking havoc on the US political and judicial systems — benefits Putin and Russia.
Ukraine in particular has been a focus of Trump’s malevolence, beginning with the 2016 Republican convention, when the only change to the Republican platform the Trump campaign insisted upon making called for weakening U.S. military support for Ukraine — and it wasn’t as if “UKRAINE!!” was at the top of anyone’s list of priorities in the summer of 2016 — at least, not among any of Trump’s deplorable followers.
The current tumult has nothing to do with “policy” — the idea that Trump cares about “policy” is laughable on its face; Trump has no policies — only reactionary clickbait designed to stir up his base. Trump serves to advance the interests of, first, Vladimir Putin and, second, Donald Trump. That’s it. Everything he does — everything — can be viewed through that lens.
This latest kerfuffle is no different: Trump knows the “keep Joe Biden from accomplishing anything regarding the border” trope might eventually redound to some electoral benefit to himself, but what he knows with absolute certainty is that killing U.S. aid to Ukraine will benefit Vladimir Putin immediately and significantly.
Immigration policy can be fixed as soon as Dems take over both houses of Congress next January (which I believe they will, along with holding the White House) – but without U.S. aid, Ukraine’s very survival in the next year is an open question.
And Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin both know it.
