Republicans are so eager to see Biden fail that they’d let Putin succeed

Republicans are so eager to see Biden fail that they’d let Putin succeed

By Dana Milbank

After her fellow Republicans booted her from party leadership last year, Rep. Liz Cheney posed a question: “Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country?”

Now, with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we are hearing Republicans answer that question in the affirmative.

The dictator is betting that division within the United States will sap American resolve and thereby sow disunity between the United States and European democracies — allowing him to crush Ukraine’s democracy and potentially others. And Republicans are giving him exactly what he wants. They are so determined to see President Biden fail that they would let President Putin succeed.

On Tuesday, hours before Biden was to deliver his State of the Union address, Rep. Michael McCaul (Tex.), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, likened Biden’s actions toward Russia to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, saying, “We have a weak president, and he’s creating a very dangerous world.”

Also Tuesday, Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the No. 3 House GOP leader, said Biden “failed to engage in meaningful deterrence against Russian aggression,” and asserted that “the war on Ukraine represents one of the greatest foreign policy failures in modern history.”

Rep. Steve Scalise (La.), the House GOP whip, blamed Biden for giving “leverage to Vladimir Putin” and “billions of dollars in his pocket to finance this war against Ukraine.”

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) condemned Biden for failing to deter the invasion, saying, “If Ukraine had just half of the weapons that were left in Afghanistan … I imagine Putin would not have entered.”

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And Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), head of the Senate Republican Conference, said Biden’s “policies from Day One have enabled, emboldened Vladimir Putin to do what he has done,” adding that it’s “as if Vladimir Putin were Joe Biden’s secretary of energy.”

Some Republican candidates have even been fundraising off calling Biden “weak” on Ukraine.

The relentless assault no doubt undermines Biden — but it also weakens America. Biden’s response — the U.S. response — can be only as strong as Republicans allow. Suppose, for example, that Biden were to follow the advice of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and slap sanctions on Russia’s energy sector. Would Republicans tell supporters that this necessary fight against Putin will require sacrifice in the form of higher prices — and potentially much more, if the conflict escalates? Of course not: They would blame Biden for the added inflation.

Meanwhile, the attacks’ effect on public opinion is ruinous. A poll released Monday by Yahoo News-YouGov found that while an overwhelming 74 percent of Americans say the Ukraine invasion is unjustified, Trump voters actually had a more favorable opinion of Putin than of Biden. Ninety-five percent of Trump voters expressed an unfavorable view of Biden (including 87 percent holding a very unfavorable view), compared with 78 percent of Trump voters expressing an unfavorable view of Putin (with 60 percent very unfavorable). Only 3 percent of Trump voters said Biden is “doing a better job leading his country” than Putin, while 47 percent said the dictator, who has brought isolation and economic crisis to Russia, is doing a better job than Biden. By sabotaging the commander in chief, Republican leaders have made impossible any sense of national unity behind any effort in this war.

It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that Republican voters hate their political opponent more than they hate their country’s enemy. Their leaders have told them to. Trump, while opposing the Ukraine invasion, has called “peacekeeper” Putin’s actions “very savvy,” “genius” and “smart,” while “our leaders are dumb.” And Tucker Carlson’s Fox News long promoted Putin’s propaganda on Ukraine before finally pivoting to blame Biden for the invasion and faulting his response as inadequate.

That’s a bit rich, after Trump threatened to blow up NATO, unsuccessfully tried to persuade other world leaders to readmit Russia to the Group of Seven (it was kicked out after its last Ukraine invasion), and infamously tried to condition military aid to Ukraine on the country’s willingness to provide Trump with political dirt on Democrats. Republican lawmakers, eight of whom spent the Fourth of July holiday in 2018 on a kowtowing pilgrimage to Moscow, defended Trump by parroting Russian propaganda falsely blaming Ukraine for 2016 U.S. election sabotage, which Russia actually did.

After the foes of democracy attacked the Capitol, Republican legislators decided it was to their political advantage to side with the insurrectionists. They fought attempts to investigate Jan. 6. They enacted a raft of measures to suppress voting. And they labeled the insurrection itself “legitimate political discourse.”

Now, the enemies of democracy are attacking Kyiv. Republican leaders aren’t siding with them explicitly, but they still face a similar choice: do the right thing, and rally their supporters first against Putin’s invasion, or do the politically expedient thing, and rally their supporters against Biden’s response.