Shortly after his presidential inaugural, Donald Trump insisted that Russia’s Vladimir Putin “wants to have peace now.” In the days, weeks and months that followed, as Putin intensified his war in Ukraine, Trump refused to back off his increasingly ridiculous assertion, repeatedly telling the public and the world that the Russian leader was serious about ending the bloodshed, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
In fact, the ugly pattern became so obvious — the American president would vouch for Putin’s interest in peace, which would be immediately followed by another deadly missile strike in Ukraine — that Trump started telling uncomfortable jokes about this over the summer.
Unfortunately, as 2025 comes to an end, very little has changed.
On Saturday, one day before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Russia attacked Kyiv with ballistic missiles and drones, killing at least one person and wounding 27. The Associated Press reported, “Explosions boomed across Kyiv as the attack began in early morning and continued for hours.”
A day later, Trump, standing alongside Zelenskyy once again, said he believes Putin is serious about peace.
When a reporter reminded the Republican president about Russia’s latest deadly attacks in Ukraine, suggesting that they’re evidence that Putin isn’t serious about peace, Trump replied: “Ukraine has made some very strong attacks also.”
That’s true, although there’s an obvious qualitative difference that the American president really ought to understand: Ukrainians have struck back against an invading force that’s trying to take their country, while Russia launches attacks as part of an effort to take a neighboring country by force. Trump sees an equivalence between the two. That’s absurd.
As Sunday’s gathering progressed, the Republican — who had a lengthy one-on-one phone meeting with Putin before the meeting with Zelenskyy, and who said he’d talk to Putin again after the Ukrainian president left — kept going down the same rhetorical path, telling reporters that Russia wants to end the war.
What Trump neglected to mention is that Russia started the war and could end it at any time.
But the pièce de résistance came when Trump declared, in apparent seriousness, “Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed.” By this reasoning, Putin’s ongoing war should apparently be seen as a demented form of tough love. This doesn’t have to be complicated. If Trump is right, and Russia wants Ukraine to “succeed,” it could stop killing Ukrainians and end the conflict. But therein lies the point: Putin doesn’t want Ukraine to succeed; he wants Ukraine to be Russia. Putin doesn’t want peace; he wants Ukraine. The more Trump vouches for the Russian leader, the louder the questions about whether the American president is blind to reality, in Putin’s pocket or both.
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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