That ad should appeal to the remaining normie swing voters but you never know. Still, this Pew Survey from a couple of weeks ago seems relevant:
That’s a lot of Republicans who say that the war in Ukraine is important to them. It’s true they don’t care as much about it as Democrats but when 75% of the entire country believes something is in the national interest you would think the Republicans would at least be a teensy bit worried that they’re on the wrong side of this one.
There is no sign of that as yet. The younger members of the Senate all walked away from the national security bill and are strutting around like they’re Matt Gaetz, proud as peacocks. And I don’t think I have to say anything about the House. They’re on vacation.
I always hesitate to post things by Bill Kristol, particularly on foreign policy, but I’ll do it today because this is a case in which I think there’s common ground between people like me and people like him. Putin (and Trump) are on the wrong side of both of us:
A broad coalition of political forces in the United States, ranging from Mike Pence on the right to Bernie Sanders on the left, is anti-Putin. Against them stand Donald Trump and some of his acolytes, who are pro-Putin.The likely nominee of one of our two major political parties is pro-Vladimir Putin. This is an astonishing fact. It is an appalling fact. It has to be a central fact of the 2024 campaign.
But the political professionals say foreign policy doesn’t matter in elections. Americans vote on the economy. Or immigration. Or abortion rights.
That’s true to some degree. But not as much as we might think—particularly now that the post-Cold War era has ended in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The world we now live in seems more like that of 1972, or 1980, or 1988. In such a world, issues of foreign policy and national security matter in selecting a president. Putin matters.
And American voters know who Putin is. In an August Gallup poll, 95 percent of all Americans had an opinion of the Russian dictator, making him better known than any American politicians other than Biden and Trump. In that poll, Trump was seen favorably by 41 percent of Americans and unfavorably by 55 percent, while Biden’s favorable/unfavorable split was 41 percent to 57 percent.
Putin’s numbers in that poll? 5 percent favorable, 90 percent unfavorable. A YouGov poll last week was a bit rosier: 13 percent in favor of the Russian dictator, 81 percent unfavorable.
It’s actually striking that all the work of the pro-Putin right—from Trump himself to Tucker Carlson—has had so little effect in improving Putin’s image. Putin turns out to be a very hard sell. Which is all the more reason to hang Putin around Trump’s neck. It could well make Trump a harder sell to some number of swing voters.
Those who seek to save the country from a Trump second term can and should hammer home Trump’s fondness for Putin.
A Bush 1988 campaign operative was quoted as saying that they were going to make the American public believe that Willie Horton, the murderer paroled under a law signed by Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, was Dukakis’s running mate. They did a pretty good job of that. There is far better justification for making Vladimir Putin into Donald Trump’s figurative running mate. Because it’s true: A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin.
It actually is. And when you look the American public’s attitude toward Putin I don’t think it’s a net plus.
Trump has said only one thing about Navalny since the word came down that he was dead. And it’s all about him, of course:
Notice he uses the Kremlin’s language in which they described Navalny’s cause of death as “sudden death syndrome.” I’m sure the next time he meets with Vlad he be reassured that Vlad had nothing to do with his death, just as he was reassured that he had nothing to do with the election interference in 2016 and that his other pal MBS had nothing to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. He always defends his friends.
And when is someone going to ask him why he hates America so much? I’ve never heard anyone, right or left, degrade the country so often.