As the US midterms approach, Donald Trump is abandoning Ukraine’s democracy in a desperate effort to deny responsibility for worsening inflation. Yet this past weekend’s dramatic elections in Brazil and Serbia show that voters can see through such subterfuge.
There is nothing like a political party’s corrupt indifference to the plight of ordinary people to galvanize voter turnout. If US voters follow in the footsteps of their Brazilian and Serbian counterparts, a Democratic landslide is likely.
If that happens, Democrats in Congress must act quickly to rein in Trump before he does more damage to the US’s economy and global stature.
Any objective observer would see that Trump’s war of choice against Iran has inflated energy prices, because Iran predictably responded by restricting shipments in the strait of Hormuz, through which much of the Middle East’s oil and gas flows. But Trump, never one to admit error, needed a scapegoat. Enter Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
While holding off Russian troops on the front lines in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s forces have been damaging the Russian economy by attacking its oil refineries. That has finally brought the war home to ordinary Russians in the form of long lines at gasoline stations. It has also disrupted oil production, putting pressure on a major source of revenue for Putin to fund his invasion.
Trump is trying to blame the inflationary surge in US gasoline and diesel prices on these attacks, even though their effect on the global market is small compared to the diminished flow through the strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, with Russia making only limited progress in eastern Ukraine despite losing hundreds of thousands of troops, Putin has taken, as is his wont, to attacking Ukrainian civilians. He has bombed their cities and attacked their energy infrastructure to deprive them of heat for their homes this coming winter.
He seems to hope that a freezing populace will pressure Zelensky to capitulate. Yet many Ukrainians remain determined to defend their country’s democracy from Putin’s dictatorship.
So Putin has turned to his ace-in-the-hole, Trump. The naive American president, with his inattention to detail, craving for flattery, and disturbing admiration for autocrats, was easily won over.
Trump has now openly sided with Russia. He has authorized the purchase of diesel fuel from Russia, financing Putin’s attacks on Ukrainian cities. The gesture will not noticeably reduce market prices before the midterms, but it allows Trump to make a nod of acknowledgment toward the affordability crisis that he normally derides.
He has waived new sanctions on Russia which had just been adopted by overwhelming Congressional majorities in the name of the late senator Lindsey Graham, a purported friend of Trump whose devotion to Ukraine’s democracy Trump now betrays.
The Trump administration suspended delivery of defensive missiles to Ukraine and early-warning intelligence of Russian attacks just as Putin was intensifying his bombing of Ukrainian cities, leaving civilian residents to their fate.
And it reportedly greenlit a decision by Trump’s buddy Elon Musk to slow Starshield, the version of the Starlink satellite internet service that Ukraine’s military depends on for its drones to defend the front line against a vastly larger Russian military.
Finally, Trump called for an “energy ceasefire”, by which he effectively meant only an end to Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries (Ukraine has only one badly damaged refinery), not an end of Putin’s efforts to force Ukrainians to freeze this winter. Ukraine is attacking what are arguably legitimate military targets. Putin is committing war crimes. Yet Trump condemned only Ukraine’s attacks, not Russia’s.
The Ukrainian government would have welcomed a real energy ceasefire but rejected this selective one.
Trump claims his embrace of Putin is an effort to build a relationship with him so he will negotiate peace. But offering him enormous benefits in return for nothing won’t force him to the bargaining table. The former German chancellor Angela Merkel believed that tying Russia to Europe economically would preserve peace with Russia. Instead, Putin acquired the means to invade Ukraine.
Trump’s amateur diplomats – Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – are hardly primed to do better. Witkoff embarrassingly dubbed Putin a “humanitarian” for releasing one elderly American held in prison on concocted charges while Putin kept up the indiscriminate attacks on Ukrainian cities.
The envoys still seem to think that Putin aspires for only a chunk of Ukrainian territory rather than the destruction of Ukraine’s democracy.
Trump hopes his blame-Ukraine campaign will prevent a Republican midterm debacle. It should only reinforce voter sentiment that Trump is indifferent to their plight, that he would rather deploy smoke and mirrors than alter his corrupt, self-serving reign.
Will a Democratic midterm victory make a difference? The American presidency largely runs foreign policy, with little input from Congress. However, there are some things that the Democrats might do if they take the reins in January.
I would begin with sanctions on Russia. The latest round of sanctions won overwhelming bipartisan support, yet the legislation contained the traditional national-interest waiver that Trump invoked to ignore them.
The Democrats should re-enact the legislation without the waiver. They might even name the bill again after Graham. Outrage against Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is widespread among Congressional members of both parties in Washington. If the legislation can secure a veto-proof two-thirds majority, Trump would be stuck with it.
That might also break his aura of being beyond restraint. A successful rectification of US policy toward Ukraine might be followed by bills that limit Trump’s tariff authority or curtail the funds he needs to keep fighting Iran – as he is considering doing after the midterms.
There is nothing normal about the current Republican Congress’s abdication of its foreign policy role to Trump’s self-promoting priorities. Ukraine is on the frontline of the global defense of democracy. The American people see that. So does Congress. Trump may be oblivious, but under Democratic leadership, Congress should take matters into its own hands.
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Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist, a senior fellow at Yale University and a former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments
