Events over two days last month — Friday, March 6, and Saturday, March 7 — demonstrated President Trump’s willingness to sacrifice American interests in subservience to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
On that Friday, the Washington Post reporters Noah Robertson, Ellen Nakashima and Warren P. Strobel revealed that “Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East.”
The next day, Trump attended the transfer at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware of the flag-draped coffins of six U.S. members of the Army Reserve killed by a kamikaze drone strike at the Shuaiba port in Kuwait.
An inevitable, but unanswerable, question: Was the drone strike guided by information Russia provided to Iran?
CNN pointedly implied just that in a March 6 report echoing The Post’s findings: “Several Iranian drones have hit locations where U.S. troops have been in recent days. An Iranian drone struck a makeshift facility housing U.S. troops in Kuwait on Sunday, killing six U.S. service members.”
On March 7, the day he went to Dover, reporters asked Trump for his reaction to the disclosures about Russia’s support of Iran. The president responded, “If you take a look at what’s happened to Iran in the last week, if they’re getting information, it’s not helping them much.” He made no mention of the dead servicemen and women under his command.
Then Trump more or less exonerated Putin: “They would say we do it against them.” Trump was referring to the war in Ukraine.
The White House staff followed orders to toe Trump’s line. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the Russia-Iran intelligence sharing “is not making any difference with respect to the military operations in Iran.” She declined to say whether Trump has discussed the issue with Putin or whether the administration would pursue repercussions.
The failure of the commander in chief of the American armed forces to stand up for his own troops suggests that Americans should perhaps pay more attention to Graham Stuart, a Conservative member of the British Parliament, who on March 4, 2025, posted on X: “We have to consider the possibility that President Trump is a Russian asset. If so, Trump’s acquisition is the crowning achievement of Putin’s FSB career — and Europe is on its own.” (Putin was the director of the F.S.B., the Russian security agency, in the 1990s.)
Trump’s deference not just to Putin but to other authoritarian leaders has repeatedly and profoundly corrupted American foreign policy.
Keir Giles, a fellow at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank, answered my queries by sending me the publisher’s description of his forthcoming book, “American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame in Its Long War With Washington”:
Much of what Trump and his inner circle have done is precisely what the Kremlin would have wanted them to do; and in too many respects, Trump’s America has started to mimic Russia itself.
For all the chaos of Trump’s first months back in the White House, one defining feature was common to all his destructive actions: the removal of the obstacles previously set up to prevent Russia from achieving its ambitions, whether they threatened Europe or America itself.
The Trump administration’s determination to coerce Ukraine into surrendering to Russia is just the clearest example of how America is embracing Moscow’s objectives. And domestically, the war on facts and truth; the deployment of masked federal paramilitaries to the streets of major cities; the threats against neighboring countries; the consolidation of power; and the favoring of a narrow circle of oligarchs all mirror Vladimir Putin’s Russia of twenty years before.
In an email, Giles wrote that he recently discussed foreign policy with NATO officials “and as is now normal for these conversations, the topic is no longer whether or why Trump and his inner circle are prioritizing Russian interests over those of the United States, but how to mitigate the consequences of that as an established fact.”
I asked Daniel Fried, a former ambassador to Poland and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, for his thoughts on Trump’s relationship with Putin. Using the language of diplomatic understatement, Fried replied by email: “Trump does seem attracted to Putin as a strongman ruler. He seems more comfortable with — and gives more credence to — Putin than with leaders of America’s democratic allies or with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.”
Trump’s attraction to Putin, Fried continued, “stands in contrast to his contempt — intermittent but growing since the launch of the Iran war — for America’s democratic and especially European allies. Trump’s anti-European streak recalls similar views from the original ‘America first’ movement before Pearl Harbor: They held France and Britain in contempt, many admired Hitler, and thought that European security was none of America’s business. The results were catastrophic.”
Trump, for his part, has pointedly rejected claims of Russian interference in his 2016 election, describing them as part of a “Russia hoax.”
What is truly striking is that Trump’s claim of a Democratic or deep state conspiracy driving the “Russia hoax” is patently false. And he has not paid what under normal circumstances would have been the price: defeat in 2024.
Numerous reports, including Robert Mueller’s special counsel inquiry, have documented Russia’s concerted efforts to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, but the most damning information is contained in Volume 5 of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on “Russian active measures campaigns and interference in the 2016 U.S. election,” issued on Aug. 18, 2020.
The report contends that Trump elided the truth, if not lied outright, about damaging emails connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that were illicitly obtained by the G.R.U., the Russian intelligence agency. They were then passed on to Julian Assange at WikiLeaks for release to the public.
Trump, in written responses to the SCO [special counsel’s office], stated: “I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with [Roger Stone, a political adviser], nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign.” Trump further claimed that he had “no recollection of the specifics of any conversations I had with Mr. Stone between June 1, 2016 and November 8, 2016.”
Despite Trump’s recollection, the Committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.
In fact, according to the committee report, “Trump and senior campaign officials sought to obtain advance information about WikiLeaks through Roger Stone” and “Trump and other senior campaign officials specifically directed Stone to obtain information about upcoming document releases relating to Clinton and report back.”
Or take the select committee’s 110-plus-page assessment of Paul Manafort, Trump’s convention manager from March to May 2016 and then campaign chairman and chief strategist through that August.
Some of the key committee findings: “On numerous occasions over the course of his time on the Trump campaign, Manafort sought to secretly share internal campaign information with [Konstantin] Kilimnik,” a Russian-Ukrainian political consultant possibly tied to Russian intelligence, including “sensitive campaign polling data and the campaign’s strategy for beating Hillary Clinton.”
What concerned the committee most about Manafort’s role?
Manafort’s presence on the campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for the Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.
Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska [a Russian oligarch], represented a grave counterintelligence threat.
Despite the litany of devastating facts and conclusions in the 966 pages of Volume 5 of the committee’s report, it received brief, albeit intense, news coverage, getting quickly drowned out that summer by the presidential election, the global Covid death toll surpassing 800,000, Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as running mate, the Democratic convention, and so on.
Trump, before and after the publication of Volume 5, persistently defended Putin. In 2018, two years before the report was issued, Trump rejected the conclusions drawn by his own top intelligence appointees, including Mike Pompeo, then director of the C.I.A., and Dan Coats, director of national intelligence.
At a Feb. 13, 2018, hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Coats testified that “there should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations.” He added, “Throughout the entire community, we have not seen any evidence of any significant change from last year.”
Five months later, Trump and Putin met in Helsinki. At a joint news conference, Trump and Putin repeatedly discussed Russian election interference on Trump’s behalf.
With Trump at his side, Putin claimed that “the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere into internal American affairs, including the election process.”
Trump, in turn, asserted that “there was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it.” He added, “We won that race and it’s a shame that there can even be a little bit of a cloud over it.”
A reporter, noting that “every U.S. intelligence agency” has concluded that Russia did interfere, asked, “Who do you believe?”
Trump replied, in part:
My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia.
I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.
Then, in a clear signal that he sides with Putin: “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
In terms of foreign policy, Trump’s steadfast allegiance to Putin has been most disruptive to the NATO alliance, straining America’s relationship with its European allies.
Mara Karlin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies who served as deputy under secretary of defense for policy in the Biden administration, wrote by email in response to my inquiries:
President Trump’s approach to Russia has shaken the confidence that America’s traditional European allies have in the alliance — including in America’s commitment to extended deterrence.
That has resulted in elevated defense budgets across Europe, but it has also resulted in increased discussion among some European leaders about getting nuclear weapons, finding ways to share them, or offering their own extended deterrence commitments. This uncertainty undermines the trans-Atlantic alliance. It is fundamentally unstable for European security and ultimately, for American security as well.
Trump’s attraction to authoritarian leaders extends beyond Putin.
Patricia M. Kim, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for Asia Policy Studies, wrote by email:
Trump believes that the world should be run by the great powers — that is Washington, Moscow and Beijing. This gives Putin and Xi [Jinping of China] leverage in dealing with the United States. And it gives them greater latitude to pursue destabilizing actions in their perceived spheres of influence with little consequence or response from the United States.
What compels Trump to blatantly subjugate American interests in favor of currying Putin’s favor?
Fiona Hill, another Brookings senior fellow, served from 2017 to 2019 in the first Trump administration as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council staff. She personally observed Trump during international negotiations.
In a February interview with Hill available on YouTube, Jon Sopel, a former BBC North America editor, began by saying: “One of the enduring mysteries for me, is to try to understand Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. And I wonder whether we can start there. Because I think for many people, the fact that Donald Trump never, ever seems able to criticize Vladimir Putin over anything, is bewildering.”
Hill replied:
Well, I think the first thing to disavow everybody of is the idea that there is a relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. I think that’s part of the problem, because Trump would like a relationship with Putin, and that’s exactly why he doesn’t criticize him.
It’s a kind of unrequited love of some description. You know, everyone keeps talking about bromance. He hasn’t even got there. And you know, Putin is very good at playing hard to get, incredibly hard to get. And this drives Trump mad, because he never gets what he wants off Putin, which is really adulation, respect.
Trump, Hill argued, wants Putin to make “some kind of concession so that Trump can get his peace in Ukraine and his Nobel Prize. And Putin is both denying him the ability to have a real relationship with him, leader to leader, and the ability to get these accolades for solving the war in Ukraine.”
“It’s a little sad,” Hill noted.
Is it ridiculous, Sopel asked, to suggest that Trump is a Russian asset?
Hill:
Well, that isn’t ridiculous, because as far as Putin is concerned, everyone’s potentially an asset. It doesn’t mean that they’re witting. So that’s kind of part of the problem here, because you can be pretty certain that Putin and the Russians have been spending an enormous amount of time trying to penetrate the inner circles of Donald Trump, which isn’t that difficult.
So where does that leave us?
We have a president willing to neglect his obligation as commander in chief to protect the nation’s soldiers, a president who kowtows to an authoritarian dictator actively helping America’s adversaries, a president in debt to that same dictator for services rendered in the 2016 campaign, and a president who often behaves as if he were a Russian asset, witting or unwitting.
Put another way, we have a 79-year-old president captured by an adolescent need to win the approval of … Vladimir Putin.
More important, this same president will remain in office for the next two years and nine months, empowered to continue his wanton destruction of American democracy at home, the alliances America built in the aftermath of World War II, and the very idea of freedom both here and abroad.
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