How MAGA trained the press to love the Putin/Trump alliance

Trump said one interesting thing at the last debate. And the media ignored it.

With the press primarily dedicated to flaming concerns or concern trolling about the age of the president of the United States, there has yet to be a discussion about the one interesting Donald Trump said at the June debate.

“This was his dream; I talked to him about it,” the GOP nominee said about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rest of the debate was filled with Trump’s typical yet coded support of Putin. This included tacitly blaming Biden for the invasion, attacking NATO with nonsensical lies that suggest this irreplaceable international alliance operates with the internal logic of a mafia protection ring, and promising to end a war that could end today if Putin would call off the invasion.

We must do something the press has largely abjured since January 6th, if not years before. We must take Donald Trump’s words seriously. This a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who, Universe forbid, could be president in seven months, and the consequences of his words are massive. 

Just his words as a “private citizen” have wrecked untold harm on the Ukrainian people with the House GOP delay of aid he engineered that has given Putin an advantage this butcher failed to gain for the first two years of the war. This crime against humanity, unprecedented in the history of the American post-presidency, has been almost entirely ignored by the press, of course.

Foremost, if accurate, this “revelation” makes extorting Volodymyr Zelenskyy for weapons to defend against Putin even more disgraceful. And it begs the question of why he didn’t warn America, the right, and the world, which largely sat in disbelief before Putin launched the invasion.

Of course, that warning would have landed like so many of Trump’s other empty warnings and lies. It would likely have been ignored by everyone except his fans, who would have retrofitted it to suggest his genius somehow later. But now it just suggests, like everything Trump has done since 2015, that he and Putin are in on this together.

And Putin responded by encouraging Trump’s fictional peace plan, which frontloads the implication that it would include large chunks of Ukraine for the dictator.

"I am not, of course, familiar with possible proposals for how he plans to do this,” Putin said in a news conference last week (and of course he doesn’t, because the plan doesn’t exist other than to suggest ‘I will muscle Ukraine into effectively surrendered to Putin’). “This is the key question. But I have no doubt that he means it sincerely, and we support it (the idea of ending the war)."

To someone who has spent the last few months working with Marcy Wheeler on her Ball of Thread podcast, which has thus far released episodes about Russia's attack on the 2016 election, the Steele dossier, and the beginning of the Trump/Russia investigation, this all feels horribly familiar.

There’s the coy positioning with all many pivotal acts of the conspiracy taking place in the two fascists' public encouragement of each other.

And I can say with strong confidence that Putin has an excellent idea of what Trump’s plan for carving up Ukraine looks like and can be pretty confident the Russians will love it and the Ukrainians will hate it. That’s because it’s almost certainly some version of the “peace plan” for chopping Ukraine in half that was presented to Trump’s then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, by Putin’s subordinates in 2016 as part of a quid-pro-quo offer in exchange for help in the election. Manafort said he rejected the offer. 

But the help seems to have come!

However, a significant difference between 2024 and 2016 is the degree of shamelessness in the MAGA alliance with Putin.

“At that point, they realized that it would be toxic,” Marcy notes in the most recent Ball of Thread, which you can listen to above, about the Trump campaign’s efforts to distance itself from Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos as these three grifters connections to Russia because harder to ignore in 2016.

It’s no longer toxic.

Trump can feel fully confident that the press will not dog him for joining Putin in holding an American journalist hostage until at least after the election. They won’t follow up on this revelation or spend much time wondering what happens if Trump wins and abandons Ukraine to the dictator who is trying to rape his way to Kyiv.

There are several reasons why this has happened, starting with Bill Barr successfully snowing a willing press on the Mueller Report. Trump has trained his masses to harass anyone who takes his connections to Putin seriously. And House Republicans have effectively made it their mission to inflict withering costs on anyone who warns about Russian influence on our elections by going after those experts who warned about the highly suspicious Hunter Biden laptop–which, at the absolute minimum, is a massive assault on a citizen’s privacy with no one even attempting to explain why we have any right to his entire digital live and not the same right to, say, the same of Jared Kushner.

With fascism on the rise and fascists signaling their global ambitions, reporters should recognize that reporting on the mechanisms of fascist creep is not just an option. My greatest fear is that they won’t realize their responsibility until the opportunity is gone.