MAGA Republicans’ 'creepy' Putin fixation makes them look like 'losers' — not 'tough guys': Krugman

When President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday, February 20 and expressed his solidarity with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson — a Never Trump conservative and former GOP strategist — praised Biden’s "alpha move" and slammed MAGA Republicans for not being on "the right side of history." Wilson is a scathing critic of the MAGA movement, and the affinity that so many MAGA Republicans have for Russian President Vladimir Putin is one of the reasons why he holds Trumpism in such low regard.

It was a year ago, on February 24, 2022, that Russian forces acting on orders from Putin launched a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine. That war has brought the worst fighting in Europe since World War 2, yet Putin's admirers in the MAGA movement haven't soured on him. They view Putin as a symbol of the type of nationalist machismo that, as they see it, the American left and non-MAGA conservatives lack.

Liberal economist and New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman examines MAGA Republicans' "creepy" fixation with Putin in his February 23 column. Those Republicans, according to Krugman, believe that identifying with Putin makes them "tough guys" when in reality, it makes them "losers."

"How can any American, a citizen of a nation that holds itself up as a beacon of freedom, not be rooting for Ukraine in this war?" Krugman argues. "Yet there are significant factions in U.S. politics — a small group on the left, a much more significant bloc on the right — that not only oppose western support for Ukraine but also clearly want to see Russia win. And my question, on the first anniversary of Russia's invasion, is what lies behind right-wing support for Vladimir Putin?"

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Krugman goes on to answer his own question, explaining why Putin is "the subject of" a "creepy personality cult" on the "American right." And he points out that the MAGA far right also admires another authoritarian figure in Eastern Europe: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The columnist writes, "I'd argue that many people on the right equate being powerful with being a swaggering tough guy and sneer at anything — like intellectual openness and respect for diversity — that might interfere with the swagger. Putin was their idea of what a powerful man should look like, and Russia, with its muscleman military vision, their idea of a powerful country…. The key to understanding right-wingers' growing Ukraine rage is that Russia's failures don't just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay — they also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they're having a hard time coping."

In contrast to the praise that President Biden's Kyiv visit received from anti-Trump conservative Wilson, MAGA figures ranging from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) responded by claiming that Biden cares about Ukraine more than he cares about the United States.

Krugman is hoping that the United States will continue to aid Ukraine militarily but warns that many MAGA Republicans are hoping for a very different outcome.

"None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine," Krugman writes. "If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America's Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can't stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers."