On Russia, Trump rejects public attitudes and takes new Kremlin-aligned steps

The latest national NBC News poll asked American voters which country has their sympathies in the Russian/Ukrainian war, and the results weren’t close: Only 2% of Americans sided with Vladmir Putin’s regime, while 61% chose U.S. allies Kyiv. The same poll, however, asked about Donald Trump’s sympathies, and a 49% plurality said they believe the Republican president is sympathetic to Moscow.

Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the survey along with a GOP colleague, said, “I cannot recall a moment in history when American public opinion and voters’ views of a president, as to which country they are more aligned with, have been more in conflict with each other.”

There is no reason to see the poll as an outlier. The latest national survey from Quinnipiac University found that a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war and believe he hasn’t been tough enough on Putin. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll also found that more than half of Americans agreed that the president is “too closely aligned” with Russia. Similarly, the latest CNN poll found that a majority of Americans disapprove of the Republican’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine, and 50% said his approach to the war is bad for the United States. (For more information on the polls’ methodologies and margins of error, click on any of the above links.)

With data like this, it’s tempting to think the American president, who’s been a little too eager of late to align his administration with Moscowmight consider a change in direction. He’s not. On the contrary, Trump continues to double and triple down on his unpopular approach.

During his unhinged remarks at the Justice Department late last week, for example, the president falsely suggested that Ukraine tried to “pick on” Russia. The next day, for reasons that weren’t altogether clear, Trump published a 150-word item to his social media platform, insisting that Putin was punctual for his meeting with “my Highly Respected Ambassador and Special Envoy, Steve Witkoff” — who is not actually an ambassador.

Around the same time, NBC News published this striking report:

During the presidential transition process, Trump announced that the retired general would oversee the administration’s policy toward the war, but the NBC News report, published late last week, said Moscow made it clear behind the scenes that it did not approve of Kellogg.

The next day, Trump announced that Kellogg would now have a new jobserving as his special envoy to Ukraine. It led reporter Laura Rozen to note that it “looks like Trump let Russia veto one of his negotiators.”

In case that weren’t quite enough, as this week got underway, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration has informed our longtime European allies that the United States is withdrawing from the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine — a “multinational group created to investigate leaders responsible for the invasion of Ukraine.”

The Trump administration “is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared two weeks ago. “This largely aligns with our vision.”

The latest polling suggests this is not what the American mainstream wants. The American president doesn’t seem to care.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”