In a heavily edited taped message to the nation, Joe Biden cast aspersions on Donald Trump “and other Republicans” for likening the treatment endured by the late Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny to what the former president is experiencing in American courts. He used the opportunity presented by Trump’s opportunistic remarks to increase the pressure on House Republicans to take up a Senate-passed measure designed to replenish American ordnance stocks and support America’s embattled foreign partners: Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. “The speaker needs to call a vote,” Biden closed, “so we can stand with Ukraine and send them the supplies they need to defend themselves.”
The video is the latest evidence that Biden plans to lean heavily into the notion that Ukraine’s battlefield setbacks are the result of Republican recalcitrance, and the press is more than happy to play along. “The GOP’s ambivalence on Russia has stalled additional aid to Ukraine at a pivotal time in the war,” the Associated Press observed. “The refusal of pro-Donald Trump Republicans in Congress to extend a military lifeline for Ukraine,” one CNN report read, “show [sic] that Trump is already reshaping geopolitical realities months before his possible White House return.”
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