CNN
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It remains to be seen just how lasting and severe President Donald Trump’s turn against Vladimir Putin will be.
Trump has criticized the Russian president in unprecedented terms in recent days and signaled he’ll send vital weapons to Ukraine. But he’s also given Putin plenty more time – 50 days – before really dropping the hammer with economic punishment.
To the extent this shift is genuine, though, it’s coming with a healthy dose of rewriting history.
Repeatedly this week, Trump has suggested he never really trusted Putin.
“He’s fooled a lot of people,” Trump said Monday at the White House, adding: “He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn’t fool me.”
The president echoed the point in a new interview with the BBC. Asked whether he trusted Putin, he reportedly paused for a bit.
“I trust almost nobody, to be honest with you,” he eventually responded.
That pause would seem instructive. In fact, Trump has repeatedly vouched for Putin over the years and even in recent months, despite all the evidence undermining his credibility.
Just five months ago, Trump said he did trust Putin on the most central of issues – whether he wanted peace in Ukraine. Trump now suggests the Russian president isn’t serious about that prospect.
“I believe he wants peace,” Trump said February 14, adding: “I mean, I know him very well. Yeah, I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t. … I trust him on this subject.”
It was a pretty stunning and full-throated testimonial for the former KGB officer.
Two weeks later, Trump was asked about the prospect of Putin violating the terms of any deal that might be reached – something Putin has done plenty of times done before. He dismissed the idea.
“I think he’ll keep his word,” Trump said, before suggesting he had an affinity with Putin because both had to endure the Russia investigation during his first term.
And asked by Time magazine in April whether Putin could make peace, Trump signaled it was likely.
“I think Putin will” make peace, he said.
The US president is singing a very different tune today. In fact, he said Monday that on three or four occasions, he felt they had a deal in place, only for Putin to pull the rug out from beneath them and continue to hit Ukraine hard.
(Despite these comments, Trump has opted to give Putin more time before implementing secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil.)
The administration’s trust in its negotiations with Putin was also what set off February’s Oval Office blow-up with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
After Vice President JD Vance signaled the administration preferred “diplomacy” to chest-thumping, Zelensky interjected to ask Vance whether Putin could be trusted to actually engage faithfully in talks.
“We signed ceasefire” in 2019, Zelensky said. “Ceasefire. All of them told me that he will never go [into Ukraine]. We signed him with gas contract – gas contract, yes, but after that, he broken the ceasefire, he killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners, but he didn’t do it.”
Zelensky continued: “What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about?”
Vance called it “disrespectful” for the Ukrainian leader to litigate this issue in front of the media, and things quickly went off the rails.
Ultimately, Trump was asked in that meeting what happens if Putin violates the terms of a ceasefire, and he again blanched at the suggestion.
“ ‘What if’ anything?” Trump said. “What if a bomb drops on your head right now, OK? What if they break it? I don’t know. They broke it with Biden because Biden, they didn’t respect him. They didn’t respect Obama. They respect me.”
Four and a half months later, Trump says Putin tells him very nice things during their phone calls but doesn’t back that up with actions.
“I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today, and we had a wonderful conversation,’ ” Trump said Monday. “She said, ‘Oh really? Another city was just hit.’ ”
And this is a familiar tale. Trump has often vouched for adversarial foreign strongmen who have very different agendas, and sometimes that’s blown up in his face.
Early in 2020, Trump repeatedly vouched for China and President Xi Jinping’s control over the Covid outbreak. He dismissed the idea that China was covering up the spread and praised its transparency, reportedly rejecting the idea that he should apply more pressure.
Trump made these comments despite China’s history of covering up such events and internal administration concerns that it was happening again.
Soon, when the outbreak took hold in the United States, Trump would turn to blaming China for it. The White House accused China of the same cover-up Trump had cast doubt upon.
Trump has also repeatedly defended Putin in the past, particularly his denials of Russian interference in the 2016 US election. He has even sided with Putin over his own intelligence community.
During a press conference with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018, Trump said he didn’t “see any reason why” Russia would have interfered.
“I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said.
He later claimed he had misspoken and that he meant to say he didn’t see any reason why Russia wouldn’t have done this. But the president has gone on to repeatedly cast doubt on the idea that Russia interfered, even as a bipartisan Senate investigation backed up the intelligence community’s findings.
Another politician might look at all this and ask themselves whether they invested too much faith in Xi and Putin. But Trump instead suggests that it’s other American presidents who have been the dupes.
If you look closely, though, you can see Trump tacitly acknowledging his own miscalculation. He has repeatedly pointed to how Putin says nice things but then doesn’t stand by them. Even in his anecdote about the first lady, Trump cast himself as seemingly too focused on the things Putin says to him rather than actions on the ground.
It’s normal in diplomacy to say nice things about your counterparts, even if you don’t believe them. But usually you do that a lot more with allies than adversaries.
On some level, you’re lending your credibility and legitimacy to someone who might not reward it. In Putin’s case, there was plenty of reason to believe that might ultimately be the case.
And here we are.
