At heart, Trump is a dealmaker, and his administration is the only political entity offering to stop the killing before it expands even further into world war than it already has.
By Mark Tapson, Frontpage Magazine
I am hardly alone among conservatives in stating that I greatly admire Douglas Murray, a fierce opponent of wokeness, defender of Israel, and author of such must-reads as The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West.
And that is why his latest piece in The Spectator, titled “The MAGA Movement is Wrong on Ukraine” is such a disappointment that I felt compelled to respond (the article is behind a paywall, unfortunately, but I have excerpted the key selections below).
“How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right – when it comes to Ukraine?” Murray asks and then explains.
He places the roots of the MAGA movement’s reluctance to embrace the Ukrainian cause in the revelations about Hunter Biden’s corrupt business deals in the country back in 2014.
Then Ukraine appeared on the Right’s radar again when Trump was impeached over a 2019 phone call with its President Zelensky. These two events, Murray argues, cemented in the mind of the Right the notion that Ukraine “was simply a corrupt country.”
Then came Russia’s invasion in February 2022, and for a while establishment Republicans leaped to defend the Republican principle that tanks, as Murray puts it, “should not be allowed to roll with impunity into an allied country… At the start of the invasion, the normal conservative view prevailed: Ukraine had been brutally attacked, had stood its ground, and was admirably fighting back.”
“But all the while,” he continues, “an upcoming generation of mainly online MAGA Republicans could be seen veering in a different direction.”
Murray argues that there was an element of the Right who weren’t entirely convinced that Putin was Dr. Evil. For example, influential strategist Steve Bannon hailed Putin as a defender of Christianity and an opponent of wokeness.
Then the Right, Murray writes, became bored with “the near-universal admiration for Ukraine – specifically for Zelensky.
These people understandably hate the idea of narratives being pushed on them, and they noticed that many of the lost souls who had been putting BLM flags in their Twitter bios were now posting Ukraine flags.”
Fact check: true so far. It is also true that the Right “became additionally irritated that unheroic and distinctly unmasculine figures such as Justin Trudeau of Canada were suddenly able to present themselves as wartime leaders.”
But then Murray says the Right suspected that “if Biden, Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and every other hated left-wing ‘globalist’ was shimmying up to Zelensky, there must be something wrong with him.”
The full-throated support of the globalist Left (and establishment neo-cons) is not the only reason the MAGA Right was and is skeptical of Zelensky (although it’s reason enough).
Anyone with eyes to see can tell that Zelensky is an opportunist and former actor who very much revels in playing the role of a modern-day Churchill, and who has a vested interest in perpetuating the admiration of Western elites and the flow of money and arms from America and NATO.
Then Murray claims, rather exaggeratedly and dismissively, that:
Wittingly or otherwise, the MAGA online right started to absorb Russia’s narrative on Ukraine… that Ukrainian soldiers are “literal” Nazis, that Zelensky is constantly buying villas and yachts in the south of France, that the whole war is one big money-laundering operation, that Ukraine’s war to push the Russians back is unwinnable because of the great might of the Russian army – and that the whole thing is a giant waste of US taxpayers’ money.
Murray calls this “Russia’s narrative,” and yet he does not dispute the core of it, which is that Zelensky and Ukraine are hardly the noble, spotless champions of democracy of the Democrats’ narrative.
Indeed, Murray’s only argument against this narrative is that “almost all the allegations the MAGA right make against Ukraine are infinitely truer of Putin’s Russia”:
Interested in international corruption? Try looking at Putin and his friends. Interested in an anti-Christian government? How about looking to the cynical faith of Putin, who trumpets Christian values while firing rockets at great cathedrals like that in Odessa and recruiting jihadists to fight for him. Think Ukraine is cruel in forcing draft-dodgers into the army? Consider Putin’s army recruitment processes. Dislike Zelensky for not holding an election during a total war? Have you noticed Putin’s electoral habits?
Murray concludes by disparaging the MAGA Right as being naïve and ignorant about Ukraine – that we have been captured by “memes” about “a fantasy country that they imagine they know everything about – and all of it is bad.”
Another pundit/historian I admire (but do not always agree with), Niall Ferguson, retweeted the link to Murray’s article and described it as “excellent, hard-hitting analysis of how and why the Trump-supporting Right lost its way on the issue of Ukraine and ended up legitimizing Putin’s war.”
And right there is the fault line of both men’s argument: that those of us who do not want America to be financially and militarily committed to rescuing “democracy” in Ukraine are “legitimizing Putin’s war.”
I’m disappointed to see both these thoughtful men resort to the go-to, knee-jerk accusation that anyone who hasn’t tattooed a Ukrainian flag on their forehead is, at best, “legitimizing” Putin’s invasion, or at worst, serving as Putin “stooges” and “puppets.”
This is the same argument Hillary Clinton and the rest of the far Left in America have been blasting in the media ever since 2016 when she needed to smear her presidential opponent Trump.
Murray’s defense of Zelensky seems to be that MAGA isn’t entirely wrong about him but Putin is worse. This isn’t exactly a rousing endorsement, or an argument for why America should keep funneling billions of dollars into the Ukraine money pit without a clear plan for military victory against Russia.
Neither the Zelensky fan girls on both sides of the political fence in Congress nor Murray, as far as I can see, has a plan for defeating Russia apart from intensifying and prolonging this ghastly conflict until American and Western European troops are engaged.
Trump and the MAGA Right simply want to bring an end to the war quickly, without further devastation in Ukraine, and without dragging everyone else into a hellish conflagration.
That is the only way to save “democracy” in Ukraine and to stem whatever territorial ambitions Putin may or may not have – and the only way to do that is to make a deal.
At heart, Trump is a dealmaker, and his administration is the only political entity offering to stop the killing before it expands even further into world war than it already has.
MAGA is not naïve about either Russia or Ukraine. We are not defending Putin or claiming he’s a good or trustworthy guy (VP Vance has repeatedly asserted this by promising to deal with Russia by invoking Reagan’s imperative, “Trust – but verify”).
We don’t defend or justify his invasion, even when we note that it stems in part from what Russia perceived to be NATO expansion into Ukraine.
Making America great again both domestically and on the world stage means addressing America’s pressing problems first, including reducing gargantuan debt and facing down our real enemy – China.
It means employing real-world problem-solving, not chest-beating virtue-signaling about defending democracy around the world. That is how we can best defend democracy in the short, medium, and long run.
The post Is MAGA wrong on Ukraine? appeared first on World Israel News.