Liz Cheney nails the truth about ‘the Putin wing of the GOP’

Liz Cheney nails the truth about ‘the Putin wing of the GOP’

Greg Sargent — Read time: 4 minutes

Is there a “Putin wing of the GOP”?

Rep. Liz Cheney says so. The Wyoming Republican made the charge this weekend, in reference to a former Trump administration official who openly sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Few Republicans are in that camp, of course. Most have roundly condemned Putin’s invasion and support aggressive actions against Russia in response.

But Cheney’s formulation captures something essential about today’s GOP in a deeper sense. Cheney stands for the proposition that the Republican Party must fundamentally and permanently repudiate Donald Trump’s embrace of Putin if it is to take an off-ramp from the radicalization of the Trump years.

Many Republicans are not willing to do this, and continue to hand-wave away the fact that as president, Trump sided with Putin against Ukraine, against the West and against democracy. In this sense, Cheney has captured a crucial truth about this moment.

“This is the Putin wing of the GOP,” Cheney tweeted, in response to a widely shared segment in which Douglas Macgregor, a Pentagon official under Trump, insisted that Putin has been “too gentle.”

Macgregor also suggested that Putin is right to use military force to get Ukraine to drop any aspirations of joining NATO and the West. As Matt Gertz details, Macgregor has been elevated by none other than Tucker Carlson, meaning the highest-rated talk show at the hub of conservative media — Fox News — has been a friendly forum for this “Putin wing.”

Cheney has also made a similar case elsewhere: In a recent speech, she called on Republicans and others to show “no equivocation” in denouncing Putin’s effort at violent annexation of the democratically sovereign Ukraine. The GOP tent, she said, should never “be big enough” for such views.

And when Trump declared Putin a “genius” over the invasion of Ukraine, Cheney responded: “Trump’s interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America.”

That’s the rub. There is a widespread unwillingness among Republicans to admit to some version of that notion: that when Trump was president, his interests often did seem more aligned with Putin’s than with those of the West and democracy.

Instead, many Republicans are seeking a different sweet spot. Republicans do condemn Putin’s invasion and support a robust international response. But there’s no reckoning with Trump’s conduct as president.

Instead, the focus is all on President Biden’s alleged weakness and its supposed role in causing the Russian invasion. These Republicans seem to want to maintain a mystical connection to Trump and Trumpism while simultaneously appearing hawkish toward the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

This straddle produces some serious absurdities. For instance, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) gave a big speech Monday night posturing about the need for an even tougher response than Biden has mustered. Of course, Biden has led a far more robust international effort against Putin than most observers expected, and on Tuesday he’s set to announce a ban on Russian oil imports.

But Biden’s actual response didn’t matter to Cotton. He sneered at the very idea of fighting to defend a “rules-based international order” while insisting that Putin invaded Ukraine because he knew Biden wouldn’t “stand up to Russia.”

This sort of anti-globalist preening raises a question: If not an international response to Putin, what “tougher” unilateral one does Cotton have in mind?

Even worse, let’s recall Cotton’s reaction to the impeachment of Trump for withholding military aid to Ukraine in 2019 to strong-arm Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him get reelected. Trump’s alignment with Putin led him to oust the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, put his personal lawyer in charge of Ukraine policy, and echo Russian propaganda that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.

Yet Cotton ridiculed the very idea that this was a scandal. He laughably insisted that all Trump had done was “briefly pausing aid to Ukraine” to secure a “corruption inquiry” — as if that were a laudable goal — after which Trump oh-so-innocently “released” the aid.

Similarly, when Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds gave the GOP response to Biden’s State of the Union address, she piously declared the GOP’s “solidarity” with Ukraine. Yet in 2019, she dismissed the impeachment of Trump for siding with Putin against Ukraine as a “sad day” in our history.

It should be noted that Cheney herself voted against the impeachment of Trump in the Ukraine scandal. Asked about this on CBS News, Cheney insisted she doesn’t regret that vote and that the process was flawed.

That stance from Cheney detracts from her case against fellow Republicans. She should admit Trump did deserve impeachment. (And none of this absolves Cheney of her association with the Bush administration’s heinous foreign policies and assaults on the rule of law related to the “war on terror.”)

That said, on CBS, Cheney did flatly condemn Trump for his years of trying to undermine NATO. And importantly, she declared that what we’re seeing now illustrates how pernicious and destructive those Trumpian efforts really were.

That’s the Rubicon that most Republicans will still not cross.

There might not be a sizable “Putin wing” in the GOP in the sense of overt alignment with the Russian dictator. But Cheney is right: The party’s leader himself makes up the GOP’s “Putin wing,” and this has done nothing to disqualify him as the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Until Republicans fully repudiate this, Cheney’s charge squarely hits home.