How the MAGA right went wrong on Ukraine

How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right — especially the American right — when it comes to Ukraine? To begin to grapple with this you have to go way, way back to Donald J. Trump’s first term in office.

In that time Ukraine came to the public’s consciousness just twice. The first occasion was when Trump and other Republicans began to make hay over the business dealings of Hunter Biden. Since 2014 the then vice-president’s son had been sitting on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. He was earning around $1 million annually to advise a company in a sector about which he had zero expertise. Why might a foreign company want the son of the vice-president on their board? Obviously — as all the investigations have shown since — so that the Biden name could bring contracts, grants and other support to Burisma.

The only other time Ukraine came to the attention of the American right was in 2019 when President Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s political opponents claimed that he had used the call to tell Zelensky that American aid to the country could be contingent on Ukraine helping to expose the Biden family’s financial dealings. Trump was impeached over the call but acquitted by the Senate. But these two events started to embed the idea on the right that Ukraine was simply a corrupt country, which had enriched and cooperated with its own political opponents.

This was all that Ukraine meant to most MAGA Republicans until Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

For a while the old guard of the Republican party asserted itself in the Senate and the House. With Trump in exile and fighting a thousand legal battles, Republican lawmakers such as Lindsey Graham fought to be more pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin than the next man. Some people might think that was cynical, but it was largely an assertion of a Republican principle: which is that tanks — and especially Russian tanks — should not be allowed to roll with impunity into an allied country. But all the while an upcoming generation of mainly online MAGA Republicans could be seen veering in a different direction.

For these people, the question of whether Vladimir Putin was a bad guy was not settled. During the peak of Biden’s presidency and woke, Putin became for some of them a focus of admiration. While the West had turned away from traditional values — not least the Christian faith — here was a leader who spoke in defense of such values. Shortly before Russia’s invasion, Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon was podcasting with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. “Putin ain’t woke,” said Bannon at one point. “He’s anti-woke.” “The Russian people still know which bathroom to use,” added Prince.

You might say that all this was part of the inevitable overcorrection to the period of woke. But these memes gathered force online. 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.

Then several things that are typical of our age began to occur. The first was that the online right became bored with the story and wanted to move it along. Being an essentially reactionary movement, they also began to get bored of 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.

They became additionally irritated that unheroic and distinctly unmasculine figures such as Justin Trudeau of Canada were suddenly able to present themselves as wartime leaders. When the Zelenskys did things like the Vogue shoot, they were doubtless simply trying to keep the plight of their country in the western public eye. But the online right started to find this stuff risible and smelly: if Biden, Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and every other hated left-wing “globalist” was shimmying up to Zelensky, there must be something wrong with him.

Wittingly or otherwise, the MAGA online right started to absorb Russia’s narrative on Ukraine: that it isn’t a real country, that the Ukrainians aren’t a real people, that if they are a real people then they are uniquely corrupt. On and on it went: 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.

Of course, 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?

By this stage Ukraine is not just a country that the MAGA right has never visited. It is a fantasy country that they imagine they know everything about — and all of it is bad.

Perhaps they will manage to wade their way out of the memes. Or perhaps they will find out the hard way that most of the American public may dislike woke, but they dislike dictators too — and that it is possible to keep both these dislikes inside one head, and movement, at the same time.