{"id":7413,"date":"2025-03-17T21:22:39","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T21:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/on-russia-trump-rejects-public-attitudes-and-takes-new-kremlin-aligned-steps\/"},"modified":"2025-03-17T21:22:39","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T21:22:39","slug":"on-russia-trump-rejects-public-attitudes-and-takes-new-kremlin-aligned-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/on-russia-trump-rejects-public-attitudes-and-takes-new-kremlin-aligned-steps\/","title":{"rendered":"On Russia, Trump rejects public attitudes and takes new Kremlin-aligned steps"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The latest national NBC News poll<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

There is no reason to see the poll as an outlier. The latest national survey from Quinnipiac University<\/a> 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<\/a> also found that more than half of Americans agreed that the president is “too closely aligned” with Russia. Similarly, the latest CNN poll<\/a> 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.)<\/p>\n

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 Moscow<\/a>might consider a change in direction. He’s not. On the contrary, Trump continues to double and triple down on his unpopular approach.<\/p>\n

During his unhinged remarks at the Justice Department late last week, for example, the president falsely suggested that Ukraine tried to “pick on” Russia<\/a>. The next day, for reasons that weren’t altogether clear, Trump published a 150-word item<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Around the same time, NBC News published this striking report<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia was excluded from high-level talks on ending the war after the Kremlin said it didn’t want him there, a U.S. administration official and a Russian official told NBC News. Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg was conspicuously absent from two recent summits in Saudi Arabia — one with Russian officials and the other with Ukrainians — even though the talks come under his remit.<\/p>\n

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During the presidential transition process, Trump announced that the retired general would oversee<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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

In case that weren’t quite enough, as this week got underway, The New York Times reported<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

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

The latest polling suggests this is not what the American mainstream wants. The American president doesn’t seem to care.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Steve legs<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}