Donald Trump’s gaudy, gold-plated palace at Mar-a-Lago is a court, where the Florida king treats his visitors as supplicants, not deal-makers. His mantelpiece is stuffed with the trophy heads of penitent critics who have had to swallow their pride and appeal for his help. Sometimes Trump grants favours but more often he collects scalps. One of these now belongs to the Foreign Secretary. But never mind. Lord Cameron was right to try to persuade Trump to help Ukraine.
Lord Cameron, a Tory grandee who used to meet the late Queen regularly as prime minister, reportedly charmed Trump with whimsical memories of her, but walked away empty-handed. I’m sure Trump didn’t care a jot that Lord Cameron called the former US president “protectionist, xenophobic, misogynistic” in his memoirs. More likely it made Cameron’s act of atonement seem all the sweeter. But on Brexit, Russia and Ukraine, they couldn’t be further apart.
As Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon queen of Congress, put it undiplomatically: Lord Cameron can “kiss my ass”. Trump will have felt exactly the same about our “globalist” foreign secretary. To add to the snub, Mike Johnson, the weak, embattled Republican speaker of the House, declined to meet Lord Cameron in Washington yesterday. Yet there was some point to the Foreign Secretary’s Mar-a-Lago visit. Ukraine desperately needs Congress to release $60 billion in further aid to Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelensky, under huge military pressure from Russia, said starkly on Sunday: “If the Congress doesn’t help Ukraine, Ukraine will lose the war.” As Lord Cameron said in Washington: “Future generations are going to look back on us and say, ‘Did we do enough?’”
Donald Trump has enough slavish followers in Congress to change Republican policy in a nano-second
Trump has enough slavish followers in Congress to change Republican policy in a nano-second if he snaps his fingers. For this reason alone, it was worth Lord Cameron appealing to his vanity. But if Ukraine is left in the lurch, Democrats will hang the blame firmly on Trump. They have recently hit on a new, highly effective slogan to counter “I alone can fix it”, Trump’s narcissistic answer to every problem.
When on Monday Trump tried to skirt around abortion as a vote-killer for him by issuing a muddled statement upholding the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade and defending states’ rights, the Biden campaign immediately aired a moving story about the threat to a woman’s life with the slogan: “Trump did this.”
I think we will hear these words over and over again. Video of the January 6 riot at the Capitol? “Trump did this.” Chaos in Congress? “Trump did this.” It fits almost everything Trump touches. The same goes for his obstruction of military aid for Ukraine. Joe Biden intends to force him to own his mistakes.
It is clear that Lord Cameron had the tacit permission of the White House to visit Mar-a-Lago before meeting secretary of state Antony Blinken in Washington. As notional political allies, it is far easier for a Tory like Cameron to reach out to Trump on Ukraine than it is for members of the Biden administration. He was doing them a favour.
Besides, a British Foreign Secretary has every right to visit a US opposition leader, despite the fake outrage. Then-president Barack Obama met Lord Cameron in 2009 before he was PM. According to Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the US and Americas programme at Chatham House: “It’s the ultimate pragmatic move. Ukraine needs assistance if they want to hold the line, let alone regain territory.”
Lord Cameron can claim honourably to have done everything he can — and if it’s not enough, that’s Trump’s fault. Trump’s obstinacy is of no comfort to Ukrainians, but it could help Biden hold on to power (hopefully not too late for Kyiv). Nearly 60 per cent of Americans support sending additional weapons to Ukraine, according to an Ipsos poll in February for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Although foreign policy rarely has a direct impact on voters, the notion of Trump as an agent of chaos — capable only of tearing things down, not building them up — is gaining traction.
Thanks to Trump’s interference on Ukraine, immigration and spending bills, the Grand Old Party in Congress is palpably falling apart. Some Republicans are quitting their seats early in disgust. The former speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted by a clique of Maga fanatics six months ago. Yesterday, Taylor Greene launched a scathing attack on his replacement, aimed at ensuring the new speaker meets the same fate. “Johnson has unfortunately not lived up to a single one of his self-imposed tenets,” she wrote. “He is throwing our own razor-thin majority into chaos.”
It was this threat from within that led Johnson to back out of an ill-timed meeting with Lord Cameron. He has been seeking a way to pass a Ukraine funding package with bipartisan support, infuriating the Trumpists. But some congressional Republicans are beginning to say the quiet part out loud. According to Mike Turner, the chair of the House intelligence committee, his colleagues have been infected by Russian disinformation.
Thanks to Trump’s interference on Ukraine, immigration and spending bills, the Grand Old Party in Congress is palpably falling apart.
“It is absolutely true we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” Turner said on CNN last weekend.
We know Russia ran an influence campaign in the 2016 US election. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former head of the Wagner Group, admitted in 2023 that he was behind the vast troll farm known as the “Internet Research Agency”, which pumped out pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda on US social media. I remember how impossible it was to avoid its messages at the time.
Now the same thing is happening again. On Monday the Washington Post revealed that thousands of Kremlin-linked trolls are hiding behind fake American identities to stoke US isolationism, division and fear of immigration, and undermine support for Ukraine. “It is Russia’s top priority to stop the weapons, so they are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks,” a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill told the newspaper.
This week Trump officials deliberately leaked the former president’s “private” plans for settling the war. It involves forcing Ukraine to hand Crimea and Donbas region to Russia. If Trump gets back in the White House and this comes to pass, it would be fair to say “Trump did this” on Putin’s behalf.
