The Candidate of "America Last"

The Case Against Donald Trump, Part 2

Putin just can’t believe his luck.

For as long as I can remember, foreign policy has been my chief reason to vote for Republicans for president.

Republicans stood for a more hawkish and assertive response to terrorists and dictators and a greater willingness to promote freedom and liberal democracy as a global ideal. Since the Vietnam War, by contrast, the Democrats often expressed sympathy with foreign dictators—at least, those who used the appropriate leftist rhetoric—and seemed to blame America first for every conflict.

Even when Republicans mismanaged a conflict (as during the insurgency in Iraq that began in 2004), the alternative offered by Democrats was apology and retreat. That’s why I was willing to overcome misgivings about leaders like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney (who proved especially prescient about Russia). No matter what their other faults, they were significantly better on foreign policy than their opponents.

This is particularly important in presidential elections, because foreign policy is the issue on which the Constitution gives the president far greater power and freedom than in domestic policy, where he is hemmed in by our system of check and balances. (This does not apply to Donald Trump, because the domestic threat he poses is precisely that he will not follow the Constitution.) When it comes to foreign policy and especially war, it is very difficult for Congress to prevent the president from doing something he wants to do—and even harder to require him to do something he doesn’t want to do.

You can see the obvious implication for this election. In the most important conflict right now, Russia’s war against Ukraine, Trump has already made it clear he would support Russia and Vladimir Putin rather than Ukraine.

Remember, Remember, This Fifth of November

In response to Part 1 of my election recommendation, where I previewed the entire case against him, a subscriber complained that Donald Trump’s approach to Ukraine doesn’t fall under the category of “fitness for office” because it is a policy difference, not a matter of moral or intellectual “fitness.” This is another example of how Trump relies on us to forget even the biggest events from the recent past. It is a unique feature of Trump’s malignant role in our politics that every new scandal is so astonishing it makes us forget the previous scandal—so if we manage to remember Trump’s second impeachment, we still tend to forget his first impeachment.

So let’s take a moment to remember it.

What was Donald Trump impeached for the first time around, in early 2020? He was impeached because he arbitrarily held up congressionally mandated military aid to Ukraine and offered to release it on the condition that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky provide political support for Trump’s re-election by ordering a trumped-up investigation of Joe Biden’s son. Later testimony revealed that this effort was not limited to just one phone call; the demand was pushed through a back-channel pressure campaign by some of Trump’s aides, allies, and appointees.

This is absolutely an issue of basic fitness for office: Trump has demonstrated himself to be corrupt. He has already abused the trust placed in his office, sacrificing the interests of the United States to promote his own political ambitions.

Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy is entirely consistent with his concept of the presidency as one-man rule, where the interests of the country are made synonymous with his personal and political interests. The purpose of American foreign policy is his own power, wealth, and aggrandizement. This is a return to a very old system characteristic of every monarchy and dictatorship. It is the opposite of how foreign policy is supposed to work in a republic.

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The Unserious Right

Since his first impeachment, Trump has only become more destructive to American interests.

In the months after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, there was strong bipartisan support for aid to resist Russia’s aggression. But then Donald Trump and his supporters went to work undermining it.

They did not do this because they were opposed to the deployment of the US military, because that was never even considered. Given Ukrainian valor, there was never any need to send American troops to the battlefield. All that has been required is for America to serve once again as the “arsenal of democracy,” providing weapons, technology, intelligence, and support to Ukraine. At a cost that has so far been a fraction of our military budget for a single year, we have already helped Ukraine bog down the entire Russian military and destroy much of its capacity. This is one of the cheapest and most effective uses of American resources in history.

Yet Trump has continually undermined it. In late 2023, Republicans were set to approve a new aid bill to Ukraine until Trump came out against it. His followers in the House of Representatives held up the bill for six months, at a huge cost in Ukrainian lives and battlefield initiative. He has repeatedly said he would cut off further aid to Ukraine if he is elected—often while praising Russia’s supposed military prowess. He would also restrict and delay any aid that is still voted for.

In fact, he is already doing so, indirectly. Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, who has met with Trump repeatedly and recently, is holding up European Union approval of a $50 billion loan to Ukraine that would be paid back with proceeds from seized Russian assets. This would help Ukraine while literally costing the United States nothing. But Orbán is delaying it as a favor to Donald Trump.

Trump is partly doing this out of personal enmity toward Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he blames for his first impeachment. (Zelensky in fact stayed carefully neutral through the whole process—but in Trump’s world, anyone who is not actively supporting him is an enemy.) And I am sure he also resents that Zelensky’s personal courage in office so clearly outshines his own leadership. If you can become a great man through posturing, then Trump is great. If you have to do it through action, there is no way he can compete with a man like Zelensky.

But it’s much worse than just personal pettiness. As his alliance with Orbán indicates, Trump opposed Ukraine because the conservative movement he represents is openly sympathetic to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime, which they view as a model for strongman rule wielded in the name of religious traditionalism.

This sympathy for authoritarianism is a very serious ideological degradation of the Republican Party. It is contemporary conservatism finally taking off its mask and no longer pretending to care about liberty. But it is also a degradation in the fact that it is not serious or even ideological. Authoritarian conservatives have a handful of pompously pseudo-intellectual philosophers. But for the most part, this is a movement conveyed in juvenile online memes. Typical of this is J.D. Vance’s cavalier dismissal of Ukraine. He literally told a podcast, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Elsewhere, he told a right-wing conspiracy theorist, “Dude, I won’t even take calls from Ukraine.”

Vance is not just hostile to Ukraine and deeply involved in the pro-authoritarian right. He is also openly unserious about his responsibilities as a senator or as a would-be vice-president.

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Peace in Our Time

One of the key discoveries of the past few weeks—from an upcoming book by Bob Woodward, the venerable chronicler of recent presidencies—is a report that Trump has had frequent conversations with Vladimir Putin since leaving office. This explains a meeting Trump had with Zelensky when he was visiting the US recently. As Zelensky stood stony-faced, like a man stoically enduring torture for the sake of his country (which is exactly what he was) Trump gushed about how he has a “very good relationship” with Vladimir Putin. More recently, he has repeatedly blamed Zelensky for Russia’s invasion because he “refused to make a deal” with Putin.

This explains how Trump thinks he will bring the war in Ukraine to a quick end if he is elected to office. But the only realistic way in which Trump could make a deal with Putin is by agreeing to cut off support for Ukraine and pressure Ukraine to give up a massive amount of its territory—a concession that would leave Ukraine defenseless for whenever Putin decides to relaunch the war. Trump is lining himself up to be this century’s Neville Chamberlain, who made the deal that rendered Czechoslovakia similarly defenseless against Nazi Germany and set the stage for World War II.

We can predict that Trump would do this because it is precisely what he did in Afghanistan. In March of 2020, Shay Khatiri accurately summed up Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban as “surrender with reparations”: “Trump is giving the Taliban everything they want and abandoning the Afghan government.” The attempt to put all the blame for this on President Biden is another form of the forgetting that Trump requires of his supporters. Yes, Biden deserves blame for the withdrawal from Afghanistan—but for choosing to continue and to implement Trump’s policy. People are wheedled into forgetting this because Trump is a master gaslighter. His favorite technique is that every policy is good and wise when he does it, but the moment it results in disaster, it’s somebody else’s fault. Massive deficits and trillion-dollar spending during the pandemic? Good when Trump did it—but when Biden continues that policy (with Republican support in Congress), it’s the cause of all the subsequent inflation. Similarly, a deal that gave away everything to the Taliban was good when Trump negotiated it, but suddenly became bad when Biden implemented it.

We shouldn’t agree to distort our perception of reality in this way. We should remember that Trump did to the Afghan government precisely what he is now saying he will do to Ukraine.

If Trump is elected in a few weeks, the impact would be immediate, demoralizing Ukraine and emboldening Russia. If Harris is elected, the effect would be immediate and opposite. Biden has been cautious and has not done nearly as much as he should to help Ukraine. I am not sure Harris would do much more. But at least her election would signal that Putin’s hope of hanging on, waiting out global opposition, and getting sympathetic politicians in power in the US and Europe is not going to work. It would immediately make the long-term prospects for his war much dimmer, demoralizing Russia and its supporters and emboldening Europe and Ukraine.

I should also add that if she wins, Harris will need cooperation on Ukraine from Congress. A substantial minority of congressional Republicans still support Ukraine, but the Republican leadership is now actively hostile. The current Speaker of the House, Trump sycophant Mike Johnson, recently said, “I don't have an appetite for further Ukraine funding.” So I am afraid I am going to have to ask you all to vote for Democrats in November’s congressional elections, too. I would normally like to see a Democratic president face resistance from a narrow Republican majority in Congress. This time, the best result would be a narrow Democratic majority in both houses: not enough to let them do whatever they want, but enough to let the Democratic leadership—which, astonishingly, is the sanest option right now—set the agenda.

(On a personal note, I will gladly vote for Tim Kaine in the Virginia Senate race—though it’s doubtful my vote will be needed—to keep an unhinged lunatic out of the office.)

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America Last

The final indignity is that Trump justifies his policy by describing the US as the aggressor against every tyrannical regime. He even thinks the US Civil War could have been avoided if Abraham Lincoln had only “negotiated”—presumably cutting a deal with the South to preserve slavery. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly insisted that Russia’s invasion is a legitimate response “provoked” by NATO.

They call their policy “America First,” but it is more like Blame America First—precisely the attitude Republicans used to despise when Democrats did it.

Interestingly, if you read the famous “blame America first” speech from the 1984 Republican convention, you will find this piece of advice from Jeane Kirkpatrick.

The United States cannot remain an open, democratic society if we are left alone—a garrison state in a hostile world. We need independent nations with whom to trade, to consult and cooperate. We need friends and allies with whom to share the pleasures and the protection of our civilization. We cannot, therefore, be indifferent to the subversion of others’ independence or to the development of new weapons by our adversaries or of new vulnerabilities by our friends.

Trump, by contrast, has constantly complained about NATO and treats America’s alliances as burdens we should seek to escape.

This is a policy of America Last. In Trump’s approach, every other country will get the chance to act first to shape the world the way they want, while America sits back meekly and is the last to take action in support of our values and interests.

If Trump is elected, maybe Ukraine and our other allies are not doomed. Maybe the Europeans will panic, as they should, and do something extraordinary. But the point is that America, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, will be sitting back passively and hoping that somebody else does something.

Since World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War, the world has been in the “Long Peace”—a peace earned by extraordinary American exertions in previous generations but which requires far less effort to maintain today. Yet we have gotten so used to wars being relatively small and far away that we now entertain the idea that we can just give up on all effort and the world will stay roughly as it is now.

In reality, the world we live in can get far worse and do so very quickly. A Russian victory in Ukraine would embolden dictators and could lead to many more such invasions across the world. It would create a sense that everything is up for grabs and the only rule is that might makes right. We are already beginning to see signs of this in a growing “scramble for everything,” but that is just a preview of the international chaos waiting to break out if America decides to let aggressive authoritarians do whatever they want—and do it with our blessing.

That is the future people are voting for when they vote for Donald Trump. It is a future in which America will be significantly less safe and prosperous.

We should vote against Trump because in this election he is the candidate of American weakness—the candidate of America Last.