Last week, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. On Sunday, Orban told an interviewer that Trump explained his “quite detailed plans” to end the war Russia has waged on Ukraine. The plan is to cut off assistance to Ukraine and force it to surrender:
“He has a very clear vision that is hard to disagree with. He says the following: First, he will not give a single penny for the Russo-Ukrainian war. That’s why the war will end, because it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own two feet. If the Americans don’t give money and weapons along with the Europeans, the war will end. And if the Americans don’t give money, then the Europeans won’t be able to fund this war alone. And then the war will end.”
These comments did not come as a shock. Even though Trump claims to have a secret plan to end the war in 24 hours, everybody knows his real plan is to simply let Russia win. Trump hasn’t even bothered to deny Orban’s account.
These comments place Trump’s Republican allies who remain hawkish on Russia in a bind. They wish to continue pretending Trump is not planning to hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin while supporting their party’s leader. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, a Russia hawk and prototypical anti-anti-Trumper, navigates the dilemma in the classic fashion: by hilariously denying its existence.
Jenkins’s column is dedicated to arguing there is no difference between President Biden’s stance on Ukraine and Trump’s:
Now that Messrs. Biden and Trump have the same position on the border, what’s left? Electric cars?
One of those non-differences is Ukraine.
By any realistic political logic, either would welcome a settlement to stop the fighting that Ukraine would agree to. Mr. Trump has said little (and Mr. Biden less) except that he would end the war “in 24 hours,” using U.S. military supplies as leverage — leverage, he specified, on Russia, not on Ukraine.
Jenkins’s column ignores Orban’s account of his meeting with Trump, even though it occurred two days before the column ran. Instead, he insists, incredibly, that trump has no clear position on American aid to Ukraine: “Mr. Trump, typically, says nothing intelligible about the $60 billion hung up in Congress, not that Mr. Putin was ever going to give us a cheap win.”
Nothing intelligible? Trump has opposed assistance to Ukraine from the very beginning, rotating through a series of pretexts. In May 2022, he used the baby-formula shortage as a reason to denounce arming Ukraine. “The Democrats are sending another $40 billion to Ukraine, yet America’s parents are struggling to even feed their children,” he complained in a statement.
By January 2023, Trump was warning that giving Ukraine conventional military assistance would lead to nuclear war. “FIRST COME THE TANKS, THEN COME THE NUKES. Get this crazy war ended NOW. So easy to do,” he posted.
Later that summer, his pretext for opposing aid to Ukraine had shifted to leveraging it to compel some kind of anti-Biden pseudo-investigation. “Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ, and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump said at a rally.
His new line is to insist the United States withhold aid and structure any assistance as a loan. “WE SHOULD NEVER GIVE MONEY ANYMORE WITHOUT THE HOPE OF A PAYBACK, OR WITHOUT ‘STRINGS’ ATTACHED. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SHOULD BE ‘STUPID’ NO LONGER!” Trump wrote Saturday on his social media.
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies are threatening to destroy Senate Republicans who voted for aid to Ukraine.
Jenkins, investigating this fact pattern, remains totally stumped. Who can say if Trump favors aid to Ukraine or not? Is there any clear difference between Trump’s position, with its constant opposition to helping Ukraine masked behind an ever-changing list of demands, and Biden’s? Jenkins believes the answer is “no.”
Indeed, by the end of the column, he goes from saying Biden and Trump have the same position to breaking the tie in Trump’s favor. Trump is the only candidate who might force Russia to back down:
The $1 trillion-plus Mr. Biden wants to spend forgiving student loans and subsidizing electric vehicles, if budgeted for Ukraine, really might end the war in 24 hours. Mr. Putin would cut the best deal he could, seeing himself outbid. But notice only one candidate has even breathed a word suggesting he might consider upping the stakes, and it’s Mr. Trump.
This kind of sycophantic illogic would embarrass a Communist dupe at the height of Stalinism. But it’s par for the course in conservative-movement propaganda. The embedded norms in right-wing messaging are that factions can compete for primacy with each other, but they cannot frontally attack the party leader. If Russia hawks wish to bring the party around to their side, they must do so while ignoring the obvious fact that the presidential nominee is leading the opposition to their cause. The result is absurdities like Jenkins’s apologetics in the Journal.
