As Russia continues its illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, bombarding cities and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians, some North Carolina Republicans are focusing on a different enemy: President Joe Biden.
With the situation escalating, Republicans have been quick to cast blame on Biden, whose presidency, they say, has been characterized by weak leadership and countless policy failures. They’ve even suggested that the Biden administration’s weakness is what empowered Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place.
Just don’t ask them what they think the president should be doing instead, because they don’t seem to have an answer. Republicans have offered little to no description of what being “strong” against Russia would look like. Some have said the sanctions levied on Russia by the U.S. so far haven’t gone far enough. Others seem to think the U.S. shouldn’t get involved at all. Still others, like U.S. Rep. Ted Budd, have taken on a more Trumpian tone.
Budd, the Trump-endorsed candidate running for North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2022, seemed to take a page out of the former president’s playbook when he told CBS 17 that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is “evil” but also “very intelligent.”
“Well, you have to look at it two ways. One is good or bad. I would say Putin is evil. But, that doesn’t mean he’s not smart. He’s a very intelligent actor, although I would say he’s been quite erratic in this approach to the Ukraine,” Budd said.
U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn went so far as to say that Russia’s invasion “would have never happened if former President Trump were in the White House right now.” Cawthorn also said that the U.S. currently has no leader in the White House and called for the invocation of the 25th Amendment.
Blasting Biden as “weak” on Russia is particularly ironic given that Trump was incredibly soft on Russia throughout his presidency. But, shamefully, the criticism doled out by Republicans is limited to the current president and not the former one. In the past week, Donald Trump has heaped praise on Russia, calling Putin “pretty smart” and “savvy” and saying his actions are “genius.” As usual, Republicans have refused to condemn Trump’s words.
But that’s not exactly surprising — Trump’s lenience toward Russia has been bolstered by Republicans in Congress. The News & Observer reported that Budd has voted against Russian energy sanctions and a bill that called on the G7 to ban Russia from its summits until it respects the territorial lines of Ukraine. It’s also worth remembering that Trump was impeached the first time for withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid in an effort to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals, and every North Carolina Republican voted in his favor.
The North Carolina Republican Party has been pushing “America First,” the isolationist foreign policy doctrine that guided the Trump presidency. The party hasn’t really specified what “America First” should entail in this situation, but it certainly carries the implication that the United States should sit back and watch while Putin wages war on a sovereign nation, creating a humanitarian crisis in Europe. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has suggested that the U.S. shouldn’t care about what happens with Russia and Ukraine because there’s nothing “in it for us” besides moral satisfaction.
A straw poll taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference found that only 3% of conference-goers viewed Russia as the “greatest threat to America,” while 61% said it was “Joe Biden’s incompetence.” So it will be interesting to see how the party responds to Biden’s first State of the Union address Tuesday night, as the president is expected to dedicate portions of his speech to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the global threat posed by Putin.
How Republicans think the U.S. should approach the biggest land war in Europe since World War II seems to amount to little more than “not the way Joe Biden is handling it.” Like so much else, from Obamacare to COVID to Afghanistan to inflation, the GOP has plenty of criticism, but few solutions.
