Trump consummates his bromance with Putin, selling out Europe and Ukraine

BERLIN — Donald Trump has tossed aside America’s 80-year-old alliance with democratic Europe and instead aligned with a Russian dictator who hates the West and wants to destroy it.

The president’s long-running bromance with Vladimir Putin — kept in check during Trump’s first term by responsible members of the administration — has finally been consummated.

Released from any restraints, Trump has publicly embraced a de facto alliance with a Russian war criminal. Most shameful, the president has taken up Putin’s position on Ukraine, blaming President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting a war that began with an unprovoked Russian invasion.

Trump has even begun using the Kremlin’s language in his vicious attacks on Zelensky.

It is still hard to believe, but at a time when the world is in turmoil, an American president is openly acting as a Russian shill.

Munich and Berlin, where I have spent the past few days, were sadly appropriate spots from which to watch Trump fracture America’s most important military and moral partnerships. In both cities, you can soak up the history of life under dictatorship and the painful transition to freedom.

Munich was where Adolf Hitler signed the infamous 1938 pact with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that carved up Czechoslovakia, and which convinced the führer the West was too weak to oppose his plans for empire.

Berlin is crammed with sites that recall life under fascist and communist dictatorships, from Hitler’s Third Reich to Soviet overlordship. They range from a dramatic Holocaust memorial near the U.S. Embassy and the Brandenburg Gate to the still-standing bits of the Berlin Wall — a vivid testimony to the courage of those who died trying to escape communist East Berlin to reach the freedom of the West.

» READ MORE: Trump’s appeasement of Putin is a betrayal of Ukraine and European allies | Trudy Rubin

There are reminders of how a strong, generous United States, acting on its best principles as well as its interests, helped Germany transition to democracy after World War II. President George H.W. Bush godfathered the unification of Germany after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And Germany took democracy seriously, becoming a stalwart U.S. ally and member of NATO.

Trump has now chosen to turn his back on history and partner with a despot.

For clues about what is driving the president — and our country — toward disaster, let’s look back at the week that saw Trump treat NATO partners like dirt and a war criminal like a friend.

The prelude to Trump’s break with democracies came with a Feb. 12 phone call by Trump to Putin proposing talks on peace for Ukraine. The phone call itself was a gift to Putin, ending the West’s isolation of the Russian for his bloody attempt to destroy Ukraine’s independence. Worse yet, neither Ukraine nor European partners were consulted beforehand.

Russian media crowed. Talking heads on Russian TV breathlessly announced Trump was on their side.

If there was any doubt this was true, the date of the call was the giveaway, coming immediately after the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference in which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin divided up postwar Europe between them. It’s hard to believe the choice of date was coincidental.

Next came Vice President JD Vance’s much-awaited speech on Feb. 15 at the Munich Security Conference. There was silence in the main hall as top leaders nervously awaited some clarity on U.S. policy toward a peace process for Ukraine. Instead — to the shock of all participants, me included — Vance launched an attack on the internal policies of our European allies, berating them for allegedly handicapping extremist right-wing parties.

Before his speech, Vance met with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who asked him whether he intended to raise internal political issues in his remarks, given Germany is holding strongly contested national elections on Sunday. Vance assured Steinmeier he didn’t intend to do so, then went out and praised Germany’s extreme right-wing pro-Putin party, Alternative for Germany, while falsely accusing mainstream parties of mistreating the extremists.

“He wants to build an alliance with pro-Putin parties in Europe,” was the conclusion drawn by German officials I spoke with. What was notable was how blatant this was interference in Germany’s elections, not only by Vance, but echoed by Elon Musk on his social media platform, X.

Next came Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with a team tasked with advancing talks between Ukraine and Russia. Most notably, Ukraine and the Europeans were excluded from the meeting, even though Trump has dictated that any security arrangements to make certain Putin won’t break a deal must be provided by Europe.

Rubio, who certainly knows better and was once a Russia hawk who supported Ukraine, made clear Trump had bought into Putin’s pitch that U.S. investors could make billions of dollars once the U.S. dropped sanctions against Russia, and American moneymen reentered the country. Rubio gushed about “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” once a deal was done.

From then on, Trump’s rhetoric began to sound as if it had been dictated by Moscow.

“You should have never started it,” he spewed at Zelensky regarding the war, “you should have made a deal.” This outlandish outburst blamed the Ukrainian leader for the mass invasion the world witnessed as it happened. Moreover, it tacitly endorsed the “deal” Putin has repeatedly offered, which would shrink Ukraine’s military and forbid any international help that would prevent Russia from reinvading. A likely future, since Putin has broken every deal he ever signed with Ukraine.

» READ MORE: At Munich Security Conference, Trump makes it clear: Europe and Ukraine are on their own | Trudy Rubin

Finally, in his latest, most detestable pro-Putin tirade on Trump Social, in which every sentence contained at least one lie, Trump called Zelensky “an unelected dictator” who had less than 4% support in Ukraine (the real number is 57%).

Trump repeated Putin’s call for elections in Ukraine — a ploy to try to get rid of the Ukrainian leader and install a puppet in Kyiv. However, elections during war, at a time of martial law, are illegal in Ukraine. Moreover, they would be impossible to hold when 20% of the country is occupied and millions of Ukrainians are displaced at home and abroad.

The obvious question, after a week of Trump’s capitulation to Putin, was asked by the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas: “Why are we giving them everything that they want even before the negotiations have been started? It’s appeasement. It has never worked.”

As I head home, here’s my hypothesis about the meaning of the appalling appeasement the world watched this week: Trump is dazzled by the prospect of a new Yalta accord, cooked up by him and Putin, where the U.S. can seize land in the Western Hemisphere (think Greenland and the Panama Canal).

Trump doesn’t care if Putin retakes Ukraine, so long as he takes credit for a ceasefire. In his mind, a Nobel Peace Prize beckons even if there is no peace. Meantime, his minions will interfere in European elections in hopes an extremist group of leaders will soon topple democracies, and Trump will be investing in Russian minerals and energy if he can’t get them from Zelensky.

The next date to watch for in this shameful drama of U.S. submission is May 9, when we’ll see if Trump agrees to travel to Moscow and stand as a prop on the viewing platform during the Victory Day celebration of the Soviet defeat of Nazism. Recall Putin calls Ukrainians Nazis.

Before then, it is critical Americans recognize on whose side their president now stands.