It would be an overstatement to suggest no prominent Republican officials condemned Russia in the wake of Alexei Navalny’s death. Sen. Thom Tillis said in a statement, for example, “Navalny laid down his life fighting for the freedom of the country he loved. Putin is a murderous, paranoid dictator.”
The North Carolinian added, “History will not be kind to those in America who make apologies for Putin and praise Russian autocracy. Nor will history be kind to America’s leaders who stay silent because they fear backlash from online pundits.”
This was not, however, a consensus view in GOP politics. In fact, Donald Trump and many of his likeminded allies reacted to Navalny’s death by completely ignoring it. [Update: See below.]
Their silence spoke volumes, though there were others in the party who would’ve been better off also saying nothing. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explained:
Some eight years of right-wing apologism or overt support for Trump’s treatment of Putin were suddenly cast in a very bleak light [after the news of Navalny’s death broke]. Luckily, a number of prominent voices on the right quickly figured out an effective pivot: In this scenario, Trump isn’t Putin — he’s Navalny.
Yes, some on the right recognized Navalny as a victim, but they thought the smart move would be try to exploit his death by drawing a ridiculous parallel to Trump — whom they apparently want to be seen as a Navalny-like martyr.
Take former Rep. Lee Zeldin, for example. “As the world reflects on the murder of Alexei Navalny at the hands of Putin,” the New York Republican wrote via social media, “it’s worth remembering that Democrats are actively doing Biden’s bidding as they also try to imprison his chief political opponent, Donald Trump, remove him from the ballot, and ensure he dies in prison.”
Dinesh D’Souza, a prominent conservative conspiracy theorist who received a presidential pardon from Trump in 2018, added, “Navalny=Trump.”
Also on Friday morning, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell wrote online, “Let Navalny’s death be a warning to America. If returned to power, Donald Trump will jail his opponents. This isn’t a forecast, he has already told us this.”
Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina responded to the California congressman soon after, “Your party is the one trying to jail political opponents.”
To the extent that reality has any bearing on this discussion, these Republican arguments are stark raving mad. Navalny was targeted for having the audacity to speak out against Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime and try to offer the Russian people a better option. He was poisoned, tortured, prosecuted without cause, imprisoned without cause, and ultimately murdered.
Moscow saw Navalny’s voice as inconvenient, so Russian officials silenced it. They saw his opposition leadership as a threat to Putin’s authoritarian control, so they crushed it.
To see Trump as a comparable victim is demonstrably insane. The Republican is facing multiple legal crises, not because of a Democratic plot, but because the former president is, for all intents and purposes, a career criminal who got caught. The White House, meanwhile, has literally nothing to do with the criminal charges Trump is facing, and the idea that Democrats are “trying to jail political opponents” is utterly bonkers. Trump’s apparent indifference to Navalny’s death is outrageous. Trump’s allies trying to clumsily draw a parallel between the former president and the slain Russian opposition leader is worse. Update: While I was writing this post, the former president published an item to his social media platform about Navalny. It came roughly three full days after the world learned of his death. “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump wrote. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.” In other words, to hear the presumptive GOP nominee tell it, Navalny’s death reminded Trump of how much Trump doesn’t like the United States. His statement made no reference to Putin or his government.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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