Why Even Russia is Turning on Trump
Putin’s fear of American instability should be a lesson to the White House.
BY PETER SAVODNIK
MARCH 7, 2017 1:49 PM
Until a few weeks ago, the Russian media’s portrayal of Donald Trump was mostly cartoonish and upbeat. Trump was a real-estate mogul, and he cared about money and being tough, and he admired the Russian president because he was tough, too. The same things that titillated Trump’s base titillated producers and pundits in Moscow: the manliness, the bravado, the unflinching, unthinking patriotism, the faith in all things phallic. Vladimir Putin has his pipelines. Donald Trump prefers skyscrapers. It was all so Potemkin, so compensatory, to Americans of a certain ilk—those who think grown-ups, including presidents, ought not to demean people with diseases or tweet or rant or take umbrage when an actor makes fun of you on a show that only people who already hate you watch. But to the Russian media, Trump was a known quantity, and he was portrayed the same way Russian leaders are often portrayed: of noble heart, surrounded by lackeys and opportunists.
What mattered most—what really seemed to captivate Russians’ attention—was the perception that Trump’s America would no longer be hemmed in by the conventions and compartments of the cold war or even liberal democracy. Russians have been getting platitudes about international cooperation, human rights, dead journalists, and that idiotic (utterly American) “reset” since forever, and now, at last, Washington would recognize Moscow’s rightful place in the world, which would no longer be uni- but multipolar and would more closely resemble a game of Risk in the late 19th century than, say, a global order that had been imagined and policed by the United States for the past seven decades. Trump, unlike his predecessor, unlike any American who had run for the White House or held any office anywhere, admired Putin—the strong hand of the state imposing an almost rectilinear order on the chaos of the natural world. The new president could give the Russians what they really craved, which no one else could deliver no matter how much they tried, which was respect.
Trump did not emerge out of a vacuum. There were foreshadowings at least 10 or 15 years before his election. The election, the conflagration of isms that, one suspects, is but the opening act in our collective implosion, simply ratchets up a process that began with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It is the alacrity with which Trump has moved since taking office—his disdain for process or deliberation—that has unleashed a series of kinetic energies that could fundamentally re-scramble the chess board. Hillary Clinton would likely have sought to reverse the United States’ long, slow self-marginalization—imposing a no-fly zone in Syria and, more broadly, reasserting American hegemony in the Middle East and beyond. (It’s hard to imagine Clinton acknowledging a Russian sphere of influence in the post-Soviet near abroad; Trump, who apparently has no problems with Russians bombing Syrians, seems open to as much.) All of which explains the Kremlin’s pro-Trump stance and the generally positive coverage Trump had been enjoying at Russia Today, Channel 1, NTV, and other state organs.
Until that coverage began to taper off and then, oddly, turn lackluster and sour. In January, Trump scored 202,000 mentions in the Russian media. Putin landed just 147,000. Then, in early February, less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency, that figure started to slide.
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