Will Trump abandon Ukraine if he wins in November?

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Russian forces raised their flag in the eastern city of Avdivka, what had been a Ukrainian stronghold and symbol of resistance since Russia's invasion nearly two years ago.

Two weeks ago, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, went on a rant at a campaign rally, saying he would encourage Russia to, and I quote, do whatever the hell they want to America's NATO allies if they did not meet Trump's demand to pay their fair share of NATO funding.

You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.

Trump also pointedly did not join those world leaders who had condemned the Kremlin. after news broke that the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, had died in prison. President Biden blamed President Putin.

Make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny's death.

All the while, the military aid package passed by the Senate last week, which included $60 billion for Ukraine, has stalled in the House of Representatives. So how worried should America's allies be about a second Trump presidency? What happens if the Republican Party's isolationist streak becomes the policy of the entire US? And in the meantime, how can Joe Biden protect Ukraine when Congress refuses to act? I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.

A year ago, it might have appeared unthinkable that so many Republicans would abandon Ukraine just because Trump urged them to do so.

She's reading from a piece she wrote last week about the threat Donald Trump poses if he's voted back into the White House.

A year from now, there is the not implausible chance that when a re-elected President, Donald Trump, demands that they make concessions to Putin or pull back from commitments to our treaty allies in Europe, they will follow him in that too. Consider yourself warned.

So, with that warning, you are both looking back a year and looking ahead a year. But I wondered if we could invite you to think back two years to Russian troops' first invasion of Ukraine, the shock that caused around the world. Where we are now, two years on, just in terms of giving us a sort of sit-rep, a situation report of this war, crude measure, but who's winning?

There's no question that in the initial stages of the war, Russia was defeated, in the sense that Putin made this very outrageous, audacious gamble and thought he was going to mount this lightning strike on Kiev, topple the government, take over the country, change what it was. And that failed, and it failed in a fairly spectacular way when you consider the size and relative strengths of the two militaries and the expectations of the world, which were that Ukraine couldn't possibly hold out. So I would say, Ukraine certainly defeated Russia in the initial stage of this war. It has since settled into a very devastating for Ukraine and in many ways for Russia as well war of attrition in the east and south of the country. And I think that's what strikes so much concern in the heart of those watching this is.

And some have read into this week's news of Ukraine having to withdraw from what had been a key stronghold.

Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from the key eastern town of Avdivka. They're blaming weapons shortages and the risk of losing vital military units as the Russians encircle the town. It's Moscow's biggest victory in months.

A sign that, if anything, the momentum is more with Russia than with Ukraine, partly because Vladimir Putin and Russia have deeper resources. They can fight this fight longer. And there is no sign at all, is there, Susan, that Vladimir Putin is in any mood to give up?

Well, that's right. Two points. First of all, it's absolutely true that Russia is a bigger, wealthier country with larger reserves of person power to call upon over the course of the war, that it has retooled its economy and militarized it and restarted the ability to manufacture arms, not to mention getting ammunition in huge quantities from North Korea. Putin, right now, has every incentive to keep this conflict going as he watches and waits for what he believes to be almost the inevitable collapse of Western support for Ukraine and will to hold out. And here in the United States, I'm in Washington, as we have this conversation, we're the biggest risk factor in many ways for Ukraine in the war.

Yeah, and that's exactly what we want to talk about with you in more depth. The question became sharper in the last week with news of the death of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Prison officials say Navalny went for a walk but felt unwell and quickly lost consciousness. They said medics could not revive him. President Biden blamed President Putin.

Make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny's death.

We're going to talk about how Donald Trump and Republicans reacted to that news, but you're somebody who's followed this very closely. What was just your own personal response to hearing of the death of Navalny?

You know, what a tragedy, of course, right? What a tragedy, a tragedy for Navalny's family, his wife, his two children, and a tragedy for Russia. I really, just the last few days in particular, have been struck by the death blow to hope, feeling like in many ways there was a finality to this, that it was kind of a final extinction of the space for any kind of meaningful politics inside Putin's increasingly malign dictatorship in Russia, that he has used the cover of this full-scale invasion of Ukraine to finally accomplish the finishing of his project of stifling political life inside Russia as well.

Yes, and the implications of that for Russia and for the war, people who want to learn more about that, delve more into that, and listen back to Tuesday's episode of our sister podcast, Today in Focus. But our focus here is on the American dimension and on Donald Trump in particular. Susan, just tell us about the way he responded to Navalny's death. He didn't address it for several days, eventually posting on his Truth Social platform that it just made him think about what's happening in America, and then co-opting it as part of his own long-running argument with the American judicial system. Here he was speaking to Fox News' Laura Ingraham, who asked him how he was going to pay a fine imposed by a New York judge in that civil fraud case last week, fining him $350 million plus interest.

It is a form of Navalny. It is a form of communism or fascism. The guy's a nut job.

What do you think that tells us?

Well, listen, anyone who's been following Donald Trump knows that everything for Donald Trump is about Donald Trump. So, in that sense, of course, it's not a surprise. And yet it's still quite horrifying that he would conflate himself with Navalny. Frankly, if Nelson Mandela was still around, he would conflate himself with Nelson Mandela. Donald Trump, one of his superpowers in political life, is an absolute lack of shame and a willingness to be more brazen than you could possibly imagine.

It's quite right, isn't it? It's not just the narcissism of being able to say that the New York court decision to fine him last week was his, was a form of Navalny. It's not just that. It's the fact that he is amplifying, as you say, echoing those sort of Putin points. There was a time when that made Donald Trump the outlier.

Well, look, we're eight years into this Trump era in American politics. And one of the striking aspects of his takeover of the Republican Party, because he was an outsider, essentially, who came and took over one of the two political parties, is how much he's managed to move and transform that party in his own image. It turns out that things that we thought of as foundations of the party's ideology really weren't so much, and that the sort of cult of personality has really taken over. Also, what you've seen is many Republican elected officials who didn't like Trump very much. They've left the scene.

Because we're giving away so much equipment, we don't have ammunition for ourselves right now. We don't have ammunition for ourselves. We're giving away so much. But here's the thing. I have to say.

Well, they have fallen in line, many of them, on this, as with so many other things. So it's, I think, a pretty dramatic case study of how one man has now created a movement in the Republican Party in his own sort of bizarre, toxic politics.

Is it, though, in your view, simply falling in line with the leader deferring to Donald Trump, or is there an ideological dimension to this? John Stewart this week, now, back on the behind the desk at The Daily Show, had a go at Tucker Carlson, who made this sort of propagandistic trip to Russia, in which he was singing a hymn of praise to the virtues of the Moscow subway system and the plentiful supply in Moscow supermarkets.

And that's when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn't matter as much as you thought. Corruption. If you take people's standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can't buy the groceries they want. At that point, maybe it matters less what you say or whether you're a good person or a bad person. You're wrecking people's lives and their country.

John Stewart obviously made great fun of that, but he did offer this sort of thesis on why it might be that people like Tucker Carlson are so sympathetic to Putin. Let's just hear a bit of that. It's because the old civilizational battle was communism versus capitalism. That's what drove the world since World War Two. Russia was the enemy then.

I think you're right. I think Stewart is right. It predates Donald Trump. The sort of America first, or isolationism, was a very pronounced. In fact, it was the dominant foreign policy view of American conservatives in the years leading up to World War Two.

Absolutely. As you say, and you wrote this in your latest dispatch for The New Yorker, that this America first strain is not new. And in fact, the phrase was famous before the war as the name for the movement that wanted to keep the United States out of the war. And that's partly why, when Donald Trump makes these remarks about NATO, they send a shiver down the collective spine of Europe. We should just talk about that a little bit.

One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, well, sir, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us? I said, you didn't pay your delinquent. He said, yes, let's say that happened. No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.

And goes even further and actively encourages Vladimir Putin, almost inviting him to attack European nations, particularly perhaps the small ones that are on Russia's immediate frontier. What's driving that? Because that's going further than just saying America first. We don't want to get involved in these foreign wars when he's actively, you know, beckoning, encouraging Putin to invade.

Well, that's right. You know, Donald Trump is not a man of great principle or ideology, but he does have some fixed ideas. And one of the most fixed of them is a deep and abiding skepticism of any kind of long term alliances, multilateral partnerships. He's just not interested in that. He believes consistently that whatever America's dealings are with its foreign allies and partners, it's getting ripped off.

But again, it doesn't sort of end there, because this isn't just about when Donald Trump, if and when Donald Trump, takes back the White House, this is playing out right now. And I'm thinking of the bill that Joe Biden has been desperate to get through Congress that would send foreign aid, including $60 billion, to Ukraine. There's also money there for Israel, humanitarian aid for Palestinians, and so on. This whole package has been, it did get passed through the Senate, although not with that many Republican votes. I mean, I think just 22 Republicans in the Senate voted for it, but not even going to get a hearing in the House.

We are not going to be forced into action by the Senate, who, in the latest product the Senate's over, does not have one word in the bill about America's border. Not one word about security.

The speaker there, Mike Johnson, sending everyone off for a winter vacation and saying he won't bring the bill to the floor there for a vote. What's actually at stake here if Ukraine does not get that money? And perhaps fold into your answer to what is really at stake here with the November election for Ukraine?

Yeah, no, I think that the US election is pretty existential for Ukraine, number one. Number two, as far as this aid package goes, Biden, back in October, asked Congress for $60 billion additional dollars to support Ukraine, much, though not all of it, for military assistance. The aid that the US had sent, which was very, very generous, has run out at the Pentagon. The Pentagon has announced that they have no more money to send. Ukrainian military officials, and American officials have said that the flow of weapons has stopped or been greatly reduced as a result.

Susan, we do like to ask our guests on the podcast a what else? question, something different. I'm afraid, again, Donald Trump is central to this one. You and I spoke earlier of the case in New York where a judge ruled that he, Donald Trump, has got to pay north of 350 million dollars. And then, when you add interest on it, could go to almost 100 million dollars more than that for intentional financial fraud stretching over more than a decade.

New York Attorney General Letitia James had accused the former president and his organization of overstating his net worth in order to win favorable terms on loans. In September, New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Ngoron found Trump had committed fraud for more than a decade.

He said he's going to appeal. His lawyer has said that he will pay the sort of bond you have to pay and that he does have the money to do that. And of course, that's been a central issue in this case. It really turns on how rich is Donald Trump. So that's our what else question.

Well, it is a remarkable situation where he was actually put on trial in many ways for lying about how rich he was. And filing false financial statements is actually at the core of that case. in New York state that he was recently assessed this remarkably large fine as a result of. So actually, it's really ironic that lying about your finances could get you in trouble and force you to be even in more financial trouble. He is raising money for the campaign, millions of dollars of which he's then been spending on his own legal defense.

Yeah, it would be pretty comic if, following a case that saw him insist that he was very, very wealthy. If he now said to the court, I can't afford the money you've demanded, I pay. That would have been a comic twist. Susan Glasser, thanks so much for talking to us on the podcast. I should mention because you referred a couple of times to your book.

Thanks so much for coming on. Great to be with you. Thank you.

And that's all from me for this week. Do make sure to listen back to Thursday's episode of Politics Weekly UK, as John Harris reports on what many have described as a shameful day in British politics because of MPs and even the Speaker of the House's handling of the Gaza ceasefire vote that sent the House of Commons into chaos. Search for that wherever you get your podcasts. And for anyone who is enjoying this podcast and has a spare moment, we would hugely appreciate it if you could leave us a review wherever you get your podcast. They do really help.

This is The Guardian.