When White House reporters asked President Donald Trump on Monday if Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “dictator,” the usually bombastic Trump was suddenly demure.
“I don’t use those words lightly,” Trump said.
Meanwhile, Trump had no problem smearing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by calling him a “dictator” on Truth Social in a Feb. 19 post.
Trump’s newfound restraint comes exactly three years after Russia invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. French President Emmanuel Macron is visiting Washington, D.C., in an effort to negotiate more financial, humanitarian, and military support for the beleaguered ally. During a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office on Monday, Macron pushed back against Trump’s misunderstanding of France funding Ukraine’s defense.
“Europe is loaning the money to Ukraine. They get their money back,” said Trump.
“No, in fact, to be frank, we paid, we paid 60% of the total effort,” said Macron.
France, along with other NATO member nations, is seeking reassurance that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia. Yet Trump seems content to spout lies and brag about how he’s helping the war-tattered country just by existing.
“We’re helping Ukraine like nobody’s ever helped Ukraine before,” he blathered while sitting next to Macron in the Oval Office. “If I didn’t become president, Ukraine would right now still be at a level where there would be no even thinking about a peace. And it was—it’s a sad thing that this happened. This would've never happened, this war if I were president.”
Trump was clearly just making it up as he went along, claiming with zero evidence that he is treating Ukraine better than former President Joe Biden. In fact, only one president signed Congress’ appropriated total of $174.2 billion in support and had no problem calling Putin a dictator—and that president wasn’t Trump.
Since being elected president for a second time, it’s evident that Trump has cozied up to Putin and put America’s European allies on the back burner.
At the United Nations on Monday, which is currently without a U.S. ambassador thanks to Trump and the GOP’s obsession with destroying our country’s social safety net, the U.S. was in esteemed company when it voted against a resolution to condemn Russia for the war in Ukraine. Other countries that voted “No” included Russia, Iran, North Korea, and 14 additional Russian-allied countries.
On Feb. 12, Trump bragged about a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call between him and Putin about reestablishing U.S.-Russia relations. This was a conversation that left Russian officials cheering that the chummy call “broke the West’s blockade.” Trump later remarked that Putin should be able to rejoin the G7—an international forum meant to boost te most powerful democratic heads of state, their economies, and diplomacy.
That same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth drew outrage when he announced during a visit to Brussels that Ukraine joining NATO is not “realistic,” even though it would boost the country’s security and allow it to access to increased financial support. Hegseth also enraged European officials by delivering a speech conceding Russian expansion and arguing that Ukraine returning to pre-2014 borders is an “illusionary goal” and an “unrealistic objective.”
Meanwhile, when Russian oligarchs aren’t jumping for joy over Trump and the Department of Defense’s new pro-Russia vision, they’re thrilled with co-President Elon Musk’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development and the firing of Department of Justice and CIA employees, further fracturing democratic stability across the globe.
“This all goes back to a pattern that we’ve seen from Donald Trump from the very beginning,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor on Monday. “He has always admired autocrats, strongmen, and bullies—always shown contempt for the rule of law, for truth, for accountability, for facts—because his ultimate goal is to skew things in favor of the wealthy and corrupt few at the expense of everybody else.”
It’s well documented that Putin has used authoritarian tactics for a quarter of a century via state-controlled media, poisoning political opponents, threatening any civilian dissent with prison time, nuclear proliferation, and now, illegal annexation.
Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Putin as a “dictator” isn’t just a rhetorical quirk—it’s a pattern that reflects his willingness to align with autocrats while abandoning democratic values.
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