How Trump's 'America First' MAGA movement turned the Republican Party into an 'arm of the Kremlin' [View all]

Source: The Independent

How Trump’s ‘America First’ MAGA movement turned the Republican Party into an ‘arm of the Kremlin’

President Trump’s recent attack on Volodymyr Zelensky sees GOP accused of parroting Vladimir Putin’s talking points

Saturday 15 March 2025 13:00 GMT

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This president has consistently celebrated authoritarians like Putin, Xi Jinping of China, Viktor Orban of Hungary and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as “tough” and “smart”, recognising their shared taste for power and similarly transactional approach to international relations. But it is the Russian leader who has cast the longest shadow over Trump’s political project.

The likes of Steve Bannon, Trump’s one-time chief strategist and a key influence over MAGA thinking to this day, has long seen in Putin’s Russia not a repressive and corrupt gangster state bent on weakening democratic institutions, but rather a fellow white, Christian, conservative objector to the socially progressive values being championed by the liberals of western Europe and Democratic America.

Bannon said so as long ago as 2014, telling an audience that while Putin may be a “kleptocrat” and an “imperialist”, “traditionalists” like himself “believe that at least [he] is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism – and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country. They want to see nationalism for their country.”

Putin was evidently listening and moved to actively court the American right, welcoming a visiting delegation from the National Rifle Association in 2015, for instance.

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Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-putin-russia-maga-republicans-b2708155.html

Alternate link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-america-first-maga-movement-130022374.html