It shouldn’t be controversial to posit that the best evidence for what Donald Trump would likely do as president a second time is what he did the first time. But strangely, a cross-section of interested parties are united in their determination to ignore the actual policy record of the Trump Administration. Instead, they choose to get themselves excited over a made-up version of Trump. This alliance of willful ignorance includes anti-Trump obsessed media, as well as a variety of online MAGA types who want to believe in their own made-up version of Trump, for other reasons.
The reason anti-Trump media obsessives are doing this is almost self-explanatory. They’ve trained what’s left of their brains to be permanently outraged by a version of Trump whose initial ascendance to the presidency was orchestrated by Vladimir Putin. Trump colluding with Putin is a foundational tenet of their whole long-term Trump-obsessive worldview. To discard it would be as sacrilegious as a Christian discarding the Holy Gospel.
This mythical version of Trump is best explained by George W. Bush speechwriter turned oracular Atlantic magazine pundit David Frum, who was among those who helped launch the first go-round of recurring media frenzy over Trump allegedly being in sinister collaboration with Putin. Trump had just officially received the Republican nomination in July 2016, and Frum was sounding the alarm:
Let’s be crystal clear about something right upfront: not a single one of these dark Frum prophecies ever came remotely true. 1) Trump never substantively deviated from the obligations of the founding NATO treaty, contrary to whatever Frum was even trying to suggest here, and 2) Trump certainly never recognized the Russian seizure of Crimea, despite Frum’s confident pronouncements. In fact, Trump did the opposite — he appointed as UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who declared in her first maiden speech representing the Trump Administration that “Crimea is a part of Ukraine… the United States continues to condemn and call for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea.” Haley’s declaration took place on February 2, 2017, and contrary to Frum’s omens, the Trump Administration policy on Crimea never wavered from that point. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo subsequently issued what was decreed to be the “Crimea Declaration” on July 25, 2018 — formalizing US non-recognition of Crimea for the duration of Trump’s tenure. As the declaration reads, “the United States rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.”
Is it possible to be more diametrically wrong than Frum?
Probably not, but despite his extensive record of demonstrable wrongness, Frum is still going strong today — running around making the same apocalyptic pronouncements he could’ve easily just copy-and-pasted from eight years ago. That none of his previous forecasts proved to be the slightest bit accurate does not seem to faze Frum. Evidently, his wrongness is no barrier to issuing the same apocalyptic pronouncements over and over again.
3) Trump never ended sanctions on Russia, contra Frum — he did the opposite, increasing sanctions on Russia substantially. Under Trump, new sanctions were imposed on 273 separate Russian entities and individuals. Once again, Frum could not have been proven more diametrically wrong here. Trump also signed an Executive Order on September 20, 2018 ramping up enforcement of pre-existing US sanctions against Russia, and the Trump DOJ simultaneously brought a slew of new indictments against sanctioned Russian individuals — including Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group proprietor who was blasted out of the sky in August 2023 after Putin denounced him for orchestrating a “rebellion” against the Kremlin two months prior.
4) Frum announced in 2016 that “assassinations inside the UK” would be an example of the kind of incident where Trump would surely “reject US criticism of Russia” and side with Putin. But when the closest thing approximating this actually happened during the Trump presidency, what followed was yet again the exact opposite of what Frum had ominously foretold. Following the 2018 poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in England, Trump took part in a joint effort with European NATO countries to retaliate against Russia. Leading the punitive charge, Trump shuttered the Russian consulate in Seattle and expelled 60 Russian nationals from US territory. (Germany and France expelled only four each.) If Frum’s prophecy was not definitively falsified by this, there must have been no way to falsify his prophecy in the first place. At which point, what we’re dealing with is more in the realm of unfalsifiable religious doctrine than empirical reality.
5) Where was the “Russian espionage” that Trump as president was supposedly going to invite or welcome? It never happened. Meanwhile, curiously forgotten are such episodes as when under the command of Trump, the US military killed “a couple hundred Russians” in Syria — just another countervailing fact that never seems to enter into the heads of people who bitterly insist on their belief in the Trump/Putin collusion mythos.
6) Notwithstanding the meaningless and misreported hubbub over the 2016 GOP convention platform referenced by Frum, Trump quickly acceded to the lobbying efforts of Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, as well as former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko — and by December 2017 approved the first US transfer of “lethal assistance” to Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Ministry complained in a December 23, 2017 statement that the Trump Administration had “crossed a line when it announced its intention to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine.” The statement alleged that at Trump’s direction, the US would be “an accomplice in fomenting a war” in Ukraine. “Unfortunately, it is a waste of time to urge American politicians to see reason,” the statement concluded.
Ask most people on the internet who find themselves exercised one way or another about Trump’s attitude toward NATO if they’re familiar with the fact that Trump presided over the expansion of NATO twice. “North Macedonia is a steadfast security partner of the United States, and its NATO membership will directly benefit United States strategic interests and the NATO Alliance,” Trump personally wrote in a letter of transmittal to the Senate dated April 29, 2019. This noteworthy example of Trump’s “rhetoric” will be curiously ignored by those who have conditioned themselves to fly into a rage anytime Trump says something uncouth at a campaign rally.
After all, Trump basically continued the same policy approach as Barack Obama in petitioning fellow NATO member-states to increase their military expenditure. While it’s true that Trump enjoyed using his signature methods of personal bluster to extract spending commitments from these European countries, the underlying policy was perfectly consistent with Obama’s. And now the bipartisan dream of the re-armament and militarization of Europe may finally be coming true: As of 2024, Germany is said to have finally crossed NATO’s advisory 2% threshold for military spending as a share of GDP. This must be welcome news for those who take great historical solace in the rapid acceleration of German re-armament.
Swaths of long-term Trump revilers have a desperate need for the factual version of Trump’s record not to exist, because they desperately need a counterfactual version they can remain perpetually outraged by. Their mythical version of Trump of course must always be treasonously aligned with Putin. Conversely, there are pockets of Trump supporters who actually do want to believe that Trump has some invisible conciliatory arrangement with Russia, because they want to believe Trump is ideologically aligned with Putin’s prerogatives. These believers also tend to ignore the extensive record of US-Russia relations severely worsening under Trump’s presidency.
Believing in some hidden collusive relationship between Trump and Putin may have always been factually and logically wrongheaded, but at least understandable when Trump first ran for the presidency in 2016 and had never held public office of any kind. There was no record of how Trump would actually go about running the government, or how his rhetoric matched up with his actions. But in the current 2024 campaign, Trump does have a record. He left behind four years of copious evidence documenting precisely what he did when he was in power for four years. Any clear-headed assessment of this record simply does not comport with the recycled conspiratorial fixations of anti-Trump obsessives, or the pro-Trump obsessions of online followers who proactively want Trump to be ideologically and strategically aligned with Putin.
Anyone who thinks the Trump Administration enjoyed positive relations with Russia simply has no regard for the available facts. Too many redundant pundits whose entire frame of reference is domestic US politics cannot comprehend that when Putin recently announced his preference for Biden over Trump, this simply could have been based on a completely explicable assessment by Putin of their respective policy records.
Statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry on January 15, 2021: “Regrettably, all attempts to improve our relations with the Trump Administration have been unsuccessful... Washington even managed to put us on its list of America’s enemies”
Demonstrating again the biggest liars in America are lauded as thought leaders, regardless of the disasters or failures they create, service to the war machine is rewarded w blood money & status.
If I actually thought that Trump would pull us out of NATO, I would cut down my weeping willow in the front yard and put a up a statue to him painted in gold. But the willow is in no danger of being displaced.
The sad thing is people are so hungry for an anti-establishment candidate that they will create one out of someone who is really only verbally anti-establishment (and even lightly at that). Judging by Trump's actions, the elite have nothing to fear, though they seem to anyway, which is the real curiosity.