Why Trump courts Russia

Keir Starmer flies to Washington today to disagree as diplomatically as he can with an American president who has sided with a murderous warmonger against democratic Europe.

So what? The clichés are broadly accurate. Trump’s lies and betrayals of the past ten days are a geopolitical earthquake. The post-war order is being torn up. The Atlantic alliance is hanging by a thread. A president who gives every sign of having been captured by Russian propaganda seems determined to end Russia’s war on Russia’s terms.

• Through his defence secretary he has ruled out letting Ukraine into Nato and called a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders unrealistic.
• At the UN he has refused to let the US condemn an unprovoked invasion as an act of aggression.
• In person he has called Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and blamed him for the war; a complete inversion of the truth.

The question is: why? As Starmer tries to make sense of this he could group his answers under four headings:

Power. Trump admires it, enjoys it and defers to it. He has condoned rather than condemned Putin’s use of naked military force ever since 2014.

• In April that year, a month after the annexation of Crimea, he said Putin had “done an amazing job” and parroted a Kremlin line that crowds in the peninsula were “marching in favour of joining Russia”.
• In 2015, as a presidential contender, he gave Putin an ‘A’ for leadership.
• In 2018, at a meeting with Putin in Helsinki as president, he accepted Putin’s claim not to have meddled in the 2016 election over the verdict of the FBI. Senator John McCain said no president had ever “abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant”.
• This month, having conceded Putin’s key war aims for nothing in return, he told journalists on Air Force One the Russians “have the cards”.

Money. Trump has used Russia as a source of finance in the past and he is being invited to do so again.

• In the early 2000s Trump “could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything,” an architect who worked for Trump for many years told Foreign Policy. “It was all coming out of Russia.”
• In 2008, the year Putin invaded Georgia, his son Donald Trump Jr said Russian funds “make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of our assets”.
• In 2016 Trump Sr admitted flipping a Florida mansion bought for $40 million to a sanctioned Russian oligarch for $100 million.
• In 2017 Reuters calculated that Russians had bought property worth nearly $100 million in seven Trump apartment buildings in Florida.
• This month the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund told Trump’s delegation to talks in Riyadh there were “joint wins” to be had as soon as sanctions were lifted in Russia, where he said US businesses had lost $324 billion since the start of the war.

Kompromat. Theories that Russia holds compromising material on Trump have not been proved. Neither have they gone away. A 35-page report compiled by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele and handed to the FBI by McCain in 2017 claimed the FSB had sensitive personal and financial information about Trump, some gleaned from a 2013 trip to Moscow as owner of the Miss Universe contest. Trump dismissed the dossier as a “witch hunt” and Putin’s spokesman called it a fabrication. Steele stands by it.

Revenge. Trump has his own story involving Zelensky. Six years ago he phoned the Ukrainian president hoping to tarnish Joe Biden before the 2020 election by persuading Zelensky to open an investigation into Biden’s son’s business dealings in Ukraine. Instead the call led to Trump’s second impeachment.

What’s more… Trump’s new intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, has blamed Nato in part for the war and repeated Moscow’s bogus claim that Ukraine hosted US-funded bioweapons labs. She’s responsible, among other things, for Trump’s top secret presidential daily brief.