Many Republicans must be asking themselves how their party came to be led by a pawn of the Russian government. Russians must be similarly surprised that Vladimir Putin has found an ally in an American political party that just four years earlier boasted of its great hostility to Moscow.
But Putin himself is surely not surprised. It is his great fortune that Trump may have laundered Russian money, abetted Russian cybercrime, and cavorted with Russian prostitutes in a Russian hotel suite. But even without those advantages—perhaps even without Trump’s presidential candidacy—all Putin would have needed to see that the GOP had become a soft target was a television.
Yes, in 2012, GOP leaders mocked President Obama for not taking a harder line against Russia. But beneath their vestigial and opportunistic Russophobia was an obvious and natural affinity. The same Republicans who considered themselves foes of the Kremlin were also in thrall to many of the same illiberal forces that keep Putin in power: bigotry, propaganda, situational ethics, and contempt for democracy.
