ANALYSIS — Some Senate Republicans are giving President Donald Trump political cover as he sides with Russia’s narrative of its brutal war in Ukraine, but some Senate Democrats expressed shock at what they call a reckless U.S. foreign policy heel turn.
Trump’s broadsides against Ukraine and its embattled president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, follow critical remarks of America’s traditional European allies by Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Collectively, the Trump administration’s actions and words appear to be a reorganization of the world order.
“We can make a deal with Russia to stop the killing,” Trump told reporters Wednesday night on Air Force One after speaking at a Florida event for investors hosted by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. “I think the Russians want to see the war end. I do, I really do.”
He then revealed his thinking about potential peace talks, which for now, have been exclusively between Trump administration and Russian officials, saying Kremlin officials “have the cards a little bit because they’ve taken a lot of territory.”
Earlier Wednesday, Trump fired off a social media post in which he called Zelenskyy a “modestly successful comedian” and a “Dictator without Elections,” while also making several false claims about the war. A day earlier, speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the president appeared to suggest Ukraine bore responsibility for the war, saying, “You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it. You should have never started it.”
Some senior Senate Democrats said they’ve been alarmed at the White House’s seeming shift away from Europe and toward Moscow. While those Democrats said they have been unable to decipher a strategic rationale for such an alignment with Moscow, they accused the administration of betraying Ukraine and Washington’s longtime European allies.
Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific and International Cybersecurity Policy, threw his hands in the air when asked Wednesday if he sees any reason why Trump would blame Zelenskyy for Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
“Zelenskyy has fought bravely and led his people in pushing back on Russian aggression,” Coons said. “The fact that our president is calling him a dictator defies common sense and history.
“Think about who President Trump is choosing to align with: North Korea, Iran, China, Russia,” he added. “Russia’s aggression has been supported by China, North Korea and Iran … as opposed to all of our NATO allies, who have joined with us in supporting Ukraine.”
Asked if Trump’s Russia realignment is the foreign policy and geopolitical equivalent of a heel turn in professional wrestling — when a heroic figure shifts to being a villain — Coons nodded: “I have theories, but they’re better off probably not repeated.”
“It seems a really odd choice to go against 75 years of American national security and foreign policy,” he said.
‘Get the war over with’
Trump’s trajectory also defies the same electorate that, as he boasts almost daily, sent him back to the White House with a decisive November victory. A Feb. 19 YouGov poll found more Americans calling Trump a dictator (41 percent) than they did Zelenskyy (22 percent). Most (71 percent) slapped that same label on Russian President Vladimir Putin, the survey found.
How Trump, along with his White House aides, sees himself became more clear Wednesday, with White House aide Taylor Budowich posting on social media an AI-generated picture of Trump as a monarch, donning a bejeweled crown and elaborate fur cape.
While some Republicans on Capitol Hill said they disagreed with Trump’s take on Zelenskyy and the Ukraine war, others — including those who not that long ago were blasting Russia’s aggression — were quick this week to provide cover for their party’s leader, offering some version of what Trump ally Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told reporters Wednesday: “The president wants to get the war over with.”
“Most of us pretty much agree with, ‘Hey, we got to get it done,’” Tuberville said after Senate Republicans had met privately with Vance. “President Zelenskyy, he’s not a duly elected president. We all know that because he has not had an election [since April 2019]. You know, we’ve had elections here with wars going on.”
Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, a member of the Armed Services Committee, echoed some of Tuberville’s remarks while focusing on the war’s cost to American taxpayers.
“No one’s articulated an ending point. We keep sending tens of billions of dollars over there. No one has even defined what victory looks like,” Schmitt said. “I think the people who want this war to go on forever and ever have lost a lot of credibility. President Trump ran on the idea of bringing peace, and that’s what he’s going to deliver.”
Tuberville also told reporters that the Ukraine war started “because NATO was being pushed on Russia,” though he added that Kremlin officials were at fault too. Regional analysts and Russia experts have said Putin launched his invasion over his belief that his country had a right to Ukraine, like certain other former Soviet Union states.
‘Durable peace’
Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen, another Senate Foreign Relations member, said Wednesday that he and a bipartisan group of senators met with Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference last weekend. Their message: “You have our continued support. The Ukrainian people have our continued support.”
“Imagine if, during World War II, [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] had said to Churchill and our other allies, ‘Hey, we’re no longer going to support you in the fight against fascism, Nazis, and [Adolf] Hitler unless you sign over, now, half of your natural resources,’” Van Hollen said on the Senate floor.
“This is a shameful moment for the United States. We have stood up for freedom. We have stood up for democracy. We have stood up for the rule of law,” he said. “And now, President Trump is throwing Ukraine and freedom-loving people around the world under the bus.”
But White House national security adviser Mike Waltz, a former Republican House member from Florida, contends that administration officials have become “very frustrated” with Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials.
“That’s because we presented the Ukrainians really an incredible and historic opportunity to have the United States of America co-invest with Ukraine, invest in its economy, invest in its natural resources, and really become a partner in Ukraine’s future in a way that’s sustainable,” he told Fox News on Thursday. “But also [it] would be, I think, the best security guarantee they could ever hope for — much more than another pallet of ammunition.”
In the White House’s latest warning for Zelenskyy over trading barbs with Trump and other administration officials, Waltz said: “They need to tone it down and take a hard look and sign that deal.”
Beneath Democrats’ dismay and the Trump team’s tough words for Zelenskyy could be a policy direction that just might work, according to one of former President George W. Bush’s ambassadors to Kyiv.
“Taken together, these developments appear to constitute a 180-degree turn from the approach Trump took less than a month ago, when he suggested that Putin was the principal obstacle to peace and threatened sanctions and tariffs to force him to negotiate a durable settlement to the war,” John E. Herbst, now senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, wrote recently for the nonpartisan think tank.
“If this policy is rigorously implemented,” he concluded, “it could produce a durable peace.”
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