In early 2017, the US Intelligence Agency made a clear judgment as to why Russian President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a vast effort to hamper the recent US presidential election.
Putin wanted to cripple the faith that Americans have in their elections, but they wanted to discover the US-led “liberal world order” that Russians view as a threat to their security. As a way to achieve this goal, Russia worked to help Donald J. Trump win the election.
Eight years later, Trump sat in his oval office, sitting in a fuss with Ukrainian President Voldimir Zelensky, once again making his own judgment regarding the period. There was no Russian sabotage, and only a “fake witch hunt” in which both he and Putin were victims.
“Tell me, Putin went through a lot of hell with me,” he said.
The statement was made. The president sees a common cause with Putin. Putin is a merger of interests built through his battles with people he believes to be his mutual enemies, including Democratic lawmakers, European leaders and a spectrum “deep nation” within the US government.
Trump's relationship with Putin has been scrutinized for many years by US government inquiries, assessments by foreign intelligence services and news media research. In summary, they unearthed evidence in support of a set of theories that address Trump's affinity for Russian strongmen who spent their careers eroding American interests.
There is no single, tidy explanation yet. But based solely on public action during Trump's first six weeks of office, the simple fact is that he has made little decisions about national security or foreign policy that are not supported by the Kremlin.
This is an upside down world for Susan Miller, former CIA president who led the 2017 intelligence assessment of Russia's election interference.
In an interview, Miller said he believes Trump's affinity for the Russian president is summarised in “autonomous envy.”
“Trump likes Putin because Putin controls his country,” she said. “And Trump hopes he has control of his country.”
Trump accused Zelensky of launching a war that began with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This is a war that saw a massive massacre of Ukrainian civilians. He stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine, desperately needed to fight the Russian army.
He thwarted American foreign aid programs that Putin had long disliked, including democratic programs in countries like Hungary, where Russia is bringing Russia closer to its territory of influence. He stands by his European allies, saying they cannot be trusted, suggesting that they may have to protect themselves in the future.
Trump defended his actions, saying it was a necessary measure to bring Russia to the negotiation table and advocated his status as a peace broker to end the war in Ukraine. But so far, he has pushed Zelensky far more harder to make concessions than Putin.
On Friday, he began the day with a social media post threatening economic sanctions against Russia for saying that Russia was “thumping” that was being delivered in Ukraine. However, a few hours later, he appears to be defending Putin, saying that Russia's “bombing hell from Ukraine” is in fact a sign that Russia hoped to have ended the war. He criticized Ukraine for not in his view as a motive to end the conflict.
“What is Putin getting? Calder Walton, Kennedy's government at Harvard, who wrote a book on the history of espionage between Russia and the United States, said:
“This is being dismantled right in front of the US-led international order. Putin has worked on his entire career,” he said.
How much does this all please Russian officials? Ask them.
Longtime Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov appeared on state television two days after the explosion of an oval office with Zelensky, praising the Trump administration's decision after the administration came. The new White House agenda “mainly aligns with our vision,” he said.
That same day, Putin's Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov presented the Russians with a completely different view of world history than what Kremlin officials had taught for decades. Lavrov cited the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and the rise of Hitler, saying that it is not the United States that are responsible for many of the major tragedies of history.
“Looking back, looking at history, it goes without saying that Americans have had an inflammatory role,” he said.
Miller said there is no doubt among members of her anti-intellectual team about Russia's intentions to disrupt the 2016 election. They spread disinformation and disrupted it with the aim of undermining trust in the democratic process.
At the same time, her agency team (joined by the National Security Agency and FBI officials) said she was extremely cautious and fiercely independent in assessing how Russian interference had affected Trump's election victory.
Nevertheless, during the first Trump administration, she was dressed in the crosshairs of a team of prosecutors led by John Durham. She said Durham and other prosecutors burned her over eight hours of intelligence assessment.
“They were looking for bias in our work,” Miller said. “They found nothing,” Durham's final report found no obstacles to their 2017 intelligence assessment.
Still, Trump's anger over what he calls “Russian hoax” has been festering for years.
Putin has spent years shaping Trump's views on Ukraine, but now there is little sunlight between both men's official statements about the war.
When Trump and Putin first met, at a July 2017 summit in Hamburg, Germany, the Russian president used Ukraine as a corrupt, manufactured country to dissing much of its time.
He said Russia has all the rights to influence Ukraine. He justified Russian military operations in the country by bringing up a historic example of President Theodore Roosevelt's belief that the United States has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.
Trump is a longtime Roosevelt admirer.
After leaving the meeting, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told White House aides that Putin had done his “KGB shtick” and that Trump had not pushed back any of the Russian president's claims about Ukraine.
More than two years later, the House of Representatives fired Trump each for a July 2019 call with Zelensky. Meanwhile, he continued his American military support to Ukraine, which helped Zelensky to dig up the dirt into his political enemies.
The episode further focused on Trump's views not only on his views on Ukraine, but also on his enemy of his “deep state” who testified during the permeation process.
He also began radicalizing other Republicans against Ukraine, which began to reflect some of the languages Putin had long used about the country.
The convergence of this view has become even more pronounced in the weeks since Trump returned to power, as his administration presses Ukraine to negotiate a peace deal with Russia.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized the Ukrainian conflict on Fox News as a dangerous “visible war” between the United States and Russia, rather than a clear incident of Russian invasion.
Kremlin spokesman Peskov said in a subsequent statement that he agreed entirely. He said he lined up another example of the White House and Kremlin location “completely.”
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