The invasion has begun and it’s not just some little incursion in the “newly independent states.” They are shelling Kyiv. And tanks are rolling from Belarus to the capitol.
I’m sure you’ll all be following this on TV and we’ll have a lot more news tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s Aaron Rupar on how the right is covering it:
Trump on Fox News:
[Putin] sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity of this administration. As an American I am angry about it and saddened by it. And it all happened because of a rigged election. This would’ve never happened. That includes inflation and that includes millions of people pouring in on a monthly basis, far more than three million people, they are coming from 129 different countries. We have no idea what’s happening and they are destroying our country.
If that sounds like the rantings of a madman, things only got weirder from there.
Ingraham at one point mentioned a report she heard about Russian troops making an amphibious landing at Odessa. But the former president thought she was talking about American troops making a landing in Ukraine to fight Russians, and started criticizing the military for not maintaining better operational secrecy.
“You know what’s also very dangerous is you told me about the amphibious attack by Americans. You shouldn’t be saying that, because you and everybody else shouldn’t know about,” Trump said. “They should do that secretly, not be doing that through the great Laura Ingraham.”
Ingraham corrected him.
“No, those are the Russians,” she said.
“Oh, I thought you said that we were sending people in,” he said. “That’ll be next.”
While it’s hard to believe someone who was president just 14 months ago really thought American troops are fighting Russians in Ukraine, it was easy to foresee that Fox News’s primetime lineup would make plenty of excuses for Putin while trying to pin blame on Biden or, in Ingraham’s case, on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who she accused of a “pathetic display” by making a speech that represented a last-ditch effort to persuade Putin not to invade.
But Ukraine, of course, is a democracy, with a democratically elected government that has been trying to gradually move the country further away from authoritarian Russia and closer to the West. Trump, Carlson, and Ingraham, meanwhile, seem to prefer Putin to Biden — and they’re getting closer and closer to just coming right out and saying it.