Trump Puts Putin Over Patriotism
Because you can’t love your country when you only love yourself.
WHY DOES DONALD TRUMP bend over backward to excuse Vladimir Putin’s crimes and blame them on the United States? Some people think it’s bribery or blackmail. But there’s a simpler explanation, and its consequences are more serious: Trump is a pathological narcissist. He’s incapable of patriotism.
Trump talks a lot about “America First.” But he lacks the core of a genuine patriot: a sense of loyalty to something larger than—and valuable apart from—himself. In the past two months, he has displayed this pathology through a series of outbursts, lies, and rationalizations about the war in Ukraine. He has blamed the war on previous American presidents, renounced any obligation to continue or rectify their work, and embraced the Russian dictator as a fellow victim of American persecution.
Here’s what Trump has done since the end of February.
February 28
In an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump explains his emotional bond with Putin. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia—‘Russia, Russia, Russia,’” says Trump. “He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom. . . . The whole thing was a scam, and he had to put up with that.”
When Zelensky notes that Putin has violated previous agreements with American presidents, Trump says those violations don’t matter, because they didn’t involve Trump. “That wasn’t with me,” he scoffs. “That was with a guy named Biden who was not a smart person. That was with Obama.”
Zelensky, failing to grasp the depth of Trump’s narcissism, points out that Obama and Biden, like Trump, are Americans. “This is your president. It was your president,” he reminds Trump. But Trump bats away that consideration. “That was with Obama,” he repeats.
In fact, Trump signals that he’ll end American aid to Ukraine in part because it was a Biden policy. With cameras rolling, he tells Zelensky: “We gave you, through this stupid president, $350 billion.” The gratuitous insult to America’s former president compounds the insult to Ukraine’s president.
After the explosive meeting, Trump tells reporters that Zelensky, not Putin, is the obstacle to peace. Putin—who invaded Ukraine and continues to bombard its people—“wants to end” the war, says Trump, whereas Zelensky “wants to get us signed up and keep fighting. And we’re not doing that.”
March 5
American officials disclose that Trump, in addition to cutting off military aid to Ukraine, has suspended intelligence sharing with Zelensky’s government. This exposes Ukraine to more Russian attacks.
March 7
As Russia continues to bombard Ukraine, a reporter asks Trump whether “Putin is taking advantage of the U.S. pause right now on intelligence and military aid to Ukraine.” Trump responds by defending the bombardment. “No, I actually think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” says Trump, putting himself in Putin’s shoes. “He’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them. And I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”
Trump returns to the theme that he and Putin are fellow victims of the American Deep State. “Despite the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax, I’ve always had a good relationship with Putin,” he says. “He wants to end the war . . . and I think he’s going to be more generous than he has to be.”
March 13
In an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump claims that three territories invaded by Putin since 2008 were actually “given” to him by American presidents. “Crimea was given by Obama, Biden gave them the whole thing [Ukraine], and Bush gave them Georgia,” says Trump. None of this is true.
April 8
Trump blames the Ukraine war on corruption in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. He says the war “never would have happened if the election wasn’t rigged. We had a rigged election.” In subsequent appearances, Trump repeats this false allegation.
April 13
Trump accuses Biden of causing and escalating the war. “This is Biden’s war. This is not my war,” Trump insists. “He gave them [Ukraine] billions and billions of dollars.”
April 13–14
After a Russian missile barrage kills dozens of Ukrainians celebrating Palm Sunday, Trump writes it off as a “mistake.” The next day, Trump says the real mistake was committed by Biden and Zelensky: “The mistake was letting the war happen. If Biden were competent and if Zelensky were competent . . . that war should have never been allowed to happen.”
Two minutes after that slam at Zelensky, Trump accuses him more explicitly of starting the war. “He’s always looking to purchase missiles,” Trump complains. “When you start a war, you got to know that you can win the war, right? You don’t start a war against somebody that’s twenty times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”
April 22
In an interview with Time, Trump again says Ukraine provoked the invasion. “What caused the war to start,” he asserts—echoing Russian propaganda—is that Ukrainians “started talking about joining NATO.” Trump also declares that in any peace deal, Russia will get to keep Crimea because “it was handed to them by Barack Hussein Obama.” He goes on to dismiss the Crimean invasion as “Obama’s war.”
The interviewers ask Trump, “Can there be peace if Putin is president of Russia?” Trump says yes, but he stipulates that this is only because of his special talent for working with Putin. “If somebody else is president, no chance,” says Trump. “I’m the only one that can get this thing negotiated.”
April 23
On Truth Social, Trump accuses Zelensky of jeopardizing peace talks by refusing to surrender Crimea. “It’s inflammatory statements like Zelenskyy’s that makes it so difficult to settle this War,” writes Trump. He repeats that Crimea “was handed over to Russia” by Obama, and he argues that Zelensky forfeited the territory by failing to fend off Russia’s annexation of it in 2014. “If he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it?” Trump asks.
(Fact check: Russia seized Crimea by sending in tanks, surrounding Ukrainian military bases, and breaking into government offices. Trump calls this “the Obama handover.” But it shouldn’t be surprising that Trump, a serial sexual predator, interprets the victim’s failure to fight harder as consent. When you’re a tsar, they let you do it.)
April 24
In another Oval Office meeting, Trump adds to his whitewash of the Crimean invasion. “There was no fighting. There was no anything. They just handed it over,” he lies. “Now they say, ‘Well, can you get it back?’” Trump says it’s not his responsibility, because “that was given by Barack Obama when he was president, not by Donald Trump.”
April 27
Having ignored the invasion of Crimea for years, Trump—because he thinks what doesn’t concern him must not concern anybody else—infers that Ukraine ignored it, too. “Nobody brought it up for twelve years, and now they bring it up,” he grumbles. Trump says he has told Zelensky to “go back to Obama, ask him why they gave it up. . . . Don’t talk to me about Crimea.”
April 29
In an interview with ABC News, Trump again blames American political corruption. He says the Ukraine war would never have happened “if the election weren’t rigged—and it was totally rigged, the 2020 election.” But now that Trump is back in power, he insists that Putin is ready to make peace: “Because of me, I do believe that he’s willing to stop the fighting.”
IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE how morally defective this behavior is. Trump identifies more with a murderous foreign autocrat than with America’s past presidents. He feels no sense of national continuity, no responsibility to carry on or repair his country’s engagements overseas.
Trump facilitates and excuses Putin’s assaults. He deflects blame from Putin to Putin’s victims and the United States. He dismisses the Russian leader’s long record of treachery by insisting that Putin will keep his word to Trump because they have a special relationship. Trump doesn’t care what Putin did to anyone else. To Trump, all that matters is Trump.
To appreciate how warped this is, it’s helpful to go back to the last president who inherited a war he had opposed. In 2009, Obama, who had spoken out forcefully against the invasion of Iraq before it happened, gave his first speech on that subject as president. Here’s what he told the assembled Marines at Camp Lejeune:
As a nation, we have had our share of debates about the war in Iraq. It has, at times, divided us as a people. To this very day, there are some Americans who want to stay in Iraq longer, and some who want to leave faster. But there should be no disagreement on what the men and women of our military have achieved.
So I want to be very clear: We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime, and you got the job done. We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government, and you got the job done. And we will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life. That is your achievement. That is the prospect that you have made possible.
That’s how a patriot thinks. He understands that American leadership isn’t about his beefs, his enemies, or his glorification. It’s about affirming American values and uniting the country to serve them. It’s something Donald Trump will never understand.