He is prone to zig and zag, but there are unfortunate consistencies when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.
He is prone to zig and zag, but there are unfortunate consistencies when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.
O n our podcast this week, I told Rich Lowry I do not subscribe to the theory that President Donald Trump lacks a coherent foreign policy. To be sure, he is erratic and “transactional.” He is rash, so the means he impulsively commits often do not square up with the ends he desires — see, e.g., overkill (literally) in the operations against suspected Caribbean drug boats and disastrous planning inadequacies in Iran. He is prone to zig and zag when he gets into political hot water, when he is flattered, or when some potentially lucrative score comes into focus. See, for example, the sleazy deal to acquire Russian assets, negotiated by his conflicted emissaries — who just happen to be his private business partners — even as he was signing the Lindsey Graham bill to sanction Russia and its abettors (the very legislation he just nullified by waiver). See also the pardons he has granted to fraudsters and drug traffickers while his administration has been making a show of resolve against fraud and drug-trafficking. Nevertheless, the president has some consistent through-lines, which, far from lacking coherence, are simply dark.
We don’t like to think of American presidents as having core dispositions that are against American interests. We’d rather rationalize that a president clearly in the wrong is either confused or misled. But Trump habitually conflates America’s interests and his own preferences, even when they are patently different — and that’s narcissism, not confusion.
On the podcast, I posited that among Trump’s policy consistencies is that he likes Russia’s strongman, Vladimir Putin, and detests Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, the victim in Putin’s barbaric war of aggression. I elaborated that Trump believes he has a personal bond with Putin because he sees Russiagate — the Trump-Russia scandal (and the subject of my 2019 book, Ball of Collusion) — as a defamatory tribulation that he and Putin endured together. He also believes that Zelensky is part of the array of actors who conspired to conceal Joe Biden’s corruption and therefore rigged the 2020 election against him. Mind you, neither of these things is true, but each is a Trump conceit.
On The Editors podcast, Rich floated my assessment, and it provoked some interesting discussion among my colleagues. I appreciated and was edified by it. I want to make something clear, though: I am not floating a theory based on intuition about Trump. As a prosecutor, I spent many years in the business of proving intent beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’s done by reliance on the subject’s words and deeds, not clairvoyance.
In March 2025, when Trump and Vice President JD Vance had their infamous Oval Office blowup with Zelensky, I wrote the following:
And why does Trump think what he thinks [i.e., that Putin is his friend, someone with whom America can do business]? To my mind, among the least discussed but most telling moments [during the Oval Office argument with Zelensky] were the two times that Trump said he and Putin have a bond because they went through “Russia, Russia, Russia” together.
To be sure, no one can rationally begrudge the president his white-hot hostility against the Democrats who tried to destroy his first administration with baseless claims that he was a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. But in his self-absorption, he can’t or won’t discern that not everyone tied to him by the Russiagate smear is his friend — much less America’s friend. Russiagate is not something Putin suffered through; it is something he delighted in. He reveled in it to a fare-thee-well and egged Trump on in the risible notion that they were being jointly, unjustly maligned. That’s not because Putin likes Trump. It’s because he hates America.
Putin is a sophisticated, KGB-trained operator. He grasped that Democrats, with their history of appeasing the Soviet Union and Putin himself, do not care about his regime’s savagery any more than they care about the savagery of Iran, Cuba, Hamas, or fill-in-the-blank anti-American radicals. The Clinton campaign made Putin the star of its Russiagate fabrication in order to torment Trump, nothing more. And Putin was glad for the star turn because it was a rich opportunity to inflame America’s deep political divisions — infighting that makes America weaker and thus less equipped to pursue vital U.S. interests and to counter Russia and its allies (China, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, among others).
You always have to hope that Trump is more rational behind the scenes than he appears to be publicly. I say “hope” because I have my doubts. I’m not convinced he’s that canny; I think the Trump you see is the Trump you get. For all I know, he really is commiserating with Putin over how the Democrats slandered “them.” If so, what I mainly wonder is how Putin gets through such conversations with a straight face.
It’s been a year and a half, so I thought it would be useful to review exactly what Trump said along these lines. Here’s an account from Mediaite (I am relating only what Trump said, which is recorded, and omitting the anti-Trump editorializing that Mediaite threaded through its report):
“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. . . . “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. You ever hear of that deal? That was a phony. That was a phony,” Trump added. . . . “Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam, Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff. It was a Democrat scam.”
“And [Putin] had to go through that,” Trump continued. “And he did go through it. We didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff he had nothing to do with it. Came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bedroom. It was disgusting.” [ACM: Trump appears to be referring to the evidence of misconduct derived from the laptop, maintaining that the images reflected Hunter Biden’s actual behavior in bathrooms and bedrooms; it was not fabricated by the Kremlin.]
“And then they said, oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia, the 51 agents,” he said. . . . “The whole thing was a scam. And [Putin] had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff.”
The president can be shrewd, but he’s no “stable genius,” and his self-absorption renders him uniquely unreliable when he has formed personal opinions about individuals. He might not realize that Putin, being incorrigibly anti-American, thinks the divisive effect on American politics caused by Russiagate — and by the subsequent disgrace of 51 U.S. intelligence veterans who fabricated a fairy tale that Putin was likely behind the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop — were coups for the Kremlin. It would not shock me if Trump has convinced himself that Putin feels defamed by Russiagate and, ergo, that they are kindred spirits. Even if that’s not what Trump believes, it can’t be good for the United States that the president may pretend to believe such nonsense for the purpose of framing his political opponents as more anti-American than the anti-American regime in Moscow.
In any event, Trump’s position is that he and Putin bonded after being repeatedly slandered by Democrats. As for Ukraine generally, and Zelensky in particular, it’s important to remember the relevant history.
The Obama administration was a facilitator of the 2013–14 Maidan uprising, as a result of which the democratically elected, Russia-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych, abdicated and fled to Moscow. Obama officials exerted significant suasion over the new Ukrainian government that followed. Then-Vice President Biden became the administration’s point man in dealing with Kyiv. In response to Obama’s meddling, and confident that Obama was weak, Putin used these developments as a pretext to seize Crimea and start the war of conquest on Ukraine’s eastern border.
I believe Trump views Zelensky as a continuation of what he perceives to be the Ukrainian government midwifed by Obama and Biden. This is a misconception. Zelensky was elected in 2019 (more than five years after the Maidan uprising), as an outsider who vowed to combat the Ukrainian regime’s corruption. As my colleagues recounted in The Editors episode, he had support in the country’s Russia-friendly east.
That said, Zelensky’s problem vis-à-vis the vindictive U.S. president is that, through no fault of his own, he was central to the Democrats’ 2019 impeachment of Trump. The Democrats’ abuse-of-power allegation stemmed from what Trump calls his “perfect phone call” with Zelensky. In that conversation, he pressured the Ukrainian president to direct his government to probe the corruption of Joe and Hunter Biden. (Hunter had been given a well-paid sinecure on the board of Burisma, a corrupt Ukrainian oil company; Vice President Biden had threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid that Ukraine needed desperately if the government did not fire the prosecutor who happened to be investigating Burisma.)
Zelensky saw no upside for Ukraine in getting enmeshed in the American election campaign. He took no action to investigate the Bidens. For Trump, that makes Zelensky part of the conspiracy that rigged the 2020 election against him — which includes the news media and the aforementioned Democratic-led 51 intelligence officials who falsely portrayed Hunter’s laptop as a likely Russian influence operation.
Moreover, Trump regards Ukraine’s government as an ingrate, because Trump agreed in his first term to provide Ukraine with lethal defense aid to deploy against Russia (something that Obama had declined to do, despite the Democrats’ high-minded rhetoric about combating Russian aggression). And in a gesture that most have forgotten but Trump certainly has not, once Biden had finally been declared the winner of the 2020 election, Zelensky enthusiastically congratulated him, asserting that Biden “knows Ukraine better than the previous president” and “will really help strengthen relations, help settle the war in Donbas, and end the occupation of our territory.”
Imagine that you knew nothing about Trump’s relations with Ukraine other than what I just outlined in the previous paragraph. And bear in mind how deeply personal Trump’s style of politics is — a style that prioritizes his relationships with leaders of foreign regimes over how America’s vital national interests are threatened or advanced by those regimes. Suddenly, everything makes sense. Trump’s foreign policy is not incoherent. It is the foreign policy of a president who admires and feels connected to Putin but regards Ukraine as a Democratic-aligned nuisance whose president he loathes.