Donald Trump’s affection for oppressive and bloodthirsty dictators is by now so familiar that it might go unremarked, and yet also so bizarre that it goes unappreciated or even disbelieved.
Sometimes, though, a vivid reminder surfaces. That was the case this week, when stories from Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, War, became public. In the book, the legendary reporter writes that in 2020, in the depths of the pandemic, Trump prioritized the health of Vladimir Putin over that of Americans, sending the Russian president Abbott COVID-testing machines for his personal use, at a time when the machines were hard to come by and desperately needed. (The Kremlin confirmed the story; Trump’s campaign vaguely denied it.) Meanwhile, Trump told people in the United States they should just test less. So much for “America First.”
“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin told Trump, according to Woodward.
“I don’t care,” Trump said. “Fine.”
“No, no,” Putin said. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”
U.S. relations with Russia have deteriorated since Trump left office, especially since Russia launched a brutal, grinding invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But the former president has stayed in touch with Putin, according to Woodward, who says an aide told him that “there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021.”
Trump’s public line on the war in Ukraine is that Putin never would have invaded on his watch, because of his strength. Yet evidence keeps piling up that Trump is weak to any Putin overture—that Putin can get Trump to do what he wants, and has done so again and again. It happened when Trump sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies at the horrifying Helsinki summit in 2018, it happened when he declined to bring up election interference during a phone call in 2019, and it happened when Putin got Trump to hush up the transfer of the testing equipment. If Trump is so effective at pressuring Putin, and he remains in touch with him to this day, why isn’t he exerting that influence to pressure Russia to withdraw and end the war?
Putin is hardly alone. Trump’s record shows a consistent pattern of affection for dictators, with them doing little or nothing for America’s benefit in return. Russia’s apparent moves to interfere in the 2016 election by hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and leaking them—right after Trump made a public appeal for just that—is a rare example of reciprocity, though not to the benefit of the nation. Trump was drawn to the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even though Erdoğan blithely defied Trump’s requests to stop an invasion of Syria and purchased Russian weapons over U.S. objections. Trump also can’t say enough good things about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (when he’s not confusing his country with Iran), but failed to achieve nuclear disarmament despite a splashy summit with Kim.
Some people still seem unwilling to believe that Trump admires these dictators, even though he keeps telling us just that. During his first term, his advisers tried to conceal this affection, warning him in writing before a call to Putin after a corrupt election, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” (He did, of course.) When Putin warned Trump not to disclose the sharing of COVID tests, he showed a more acute grasp of domestic political dynamics than the American president. Yet Trump keeps blurting out his love for authoritarians, including one very strange moment during last month’s presidential debate. Kamala Harris charged that “world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”
“Let me just tell you about world leaders,” he replied. “Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men—they call him a strongman. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime minister of Hungary. They said, Why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago, it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said, Because you need Trump back as president.”
Orbán is not widely respected—he’s a pariah or at least an annoyance in most of the world. (Lest there be any doubt that Trump understands who Orbán is, he helpfully noted the Hungarian’s reputation as a strongman.) Orbán’s endorsement is not reassuring—my colleague Franklin Foer in 2019 chronicled some of his damage to Hungary—and the moment suggests how easily Trump can be manipulated by flattery.
Many people also persist in believing that stories about Trump’s collusion with and ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign were a hoax. This seems to be an unfortunate by-product of Special Counsel Robert Mueller not establishing any criminal conspiracy. Yet the evidence of improper relationships with Russia was out in the open long before Mueller completed his report. Not only was it not a hoax then, but Woodward’s reporting shows that Trump’s secretive dealings with the Kremlin continue to this day.
At one time, commentators seemed perplexed and puzzled by Trump’s love of dictators, because it ran so counter to typical American notions about rule of law and reverence for the Constitution and the country’s founders, to say nothing of the country’s interests.
But no reason remains for feeling confused. Trump attempted to overturn an election he lost; he denies that he lost—though he conclusively did—and he was comfortable with violence being committed in an effort to keep him in power. He has no remorse for this assault on American democracy. He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one of his second term, and though he claims it’s a joke, he’s also raised the idea of suspending the Constitution. If he returns to office, his legal team has persuaded the Supreme Court to grant him immunity for anything that can be plausibly construed as official conduct. Trump is drawn to dictators—he admires their power, their inability to ever lose—and he wants to be one.
