The anti-Ukraine right can’t stand America standing as the arsenal of democracy.
Rightwingers in the US just plain hate freedom.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surprise arrival in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with President Joe Biden and a speech before Congress has unhinged the always-seething anti-Ukraine Trumpian right, triggering a deluge of snark and grievance.
Trumpsters naturally don’t like Zelenskyy. Not only is Zelenskyy inflicting major pain on Vladimir Putin, Trump’s liege lord, but Zelenskyy was unable to supply fake “dirt” to Trump about Joe Biden during the infamous perfect phone call of 2019.
The politics of vengeance is a major aspect of Trumpism. But the anti-Zelenskyy and anti-Ukraine hysteria on the far right does go beyond the Ukrainian president’s unwillingness to play footsie with US semi-fascists.
The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine—a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer. Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better.
The Trumpsters have no problem siding with Putin’s Evil Empire in order to “own the libs”. Ronald Reagan would be spinning in his grave if he knew that so many members of his party were lining up to kiss the ass of a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret police.
Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/”Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.
The Trumpsters regard anybody who is not a creepy ethno-nationalist to be their enemy. They act like the America First isolationists who admired Hitler and Mussolini in the years leading up to World War II.
Being anti-Ukraine and anti-Zelenskyy makes Trumpsters anti-American too. History will treat them as it does the Hitler-curious US politicians and commentators of the 1930s and early 1940s. It’s fitting that the “national conservatives” – as many call themselves – can be abbreviated as Nat-C.