There is a core group close to Trump that is unabashedly pro-Putin. Some may well be on the Kremlin’s payroll. In 2016, Kevin McCarthy, then Republican House majority leader and later Speaker of the House, was recorded telling his colleagues, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” He was referring to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California who was defeated in 2018. We know that others, like Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, have been paid by RT, Russia’s state-run propaganda outlet. And without a doubt many parrot Russian talking points, whether it’s Trump praising Putin’s “genius” (the same thing Lindbergh said about the Nazis), Tucker Carlson slobbering over the dictator in a soft-focus interview and regularly trashing the Ukrainians, or the ultra-MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene asking, “Why doesn’t anyone in Washington talk about a peace treaty with Russia?”
A few honest and appalled Republicans have admitted publicly what’s going on. “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base,” said Representative Michael McCaul from Texas, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His colleague Michael Turner from Ohio, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages—some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” he said. As in the run-up to World War II, our adversaries want to divide and distract us—and they’re finding too many stooges ready to help. As Roosevelt said, it’s a Trojan horse. It’s undiluted poison.
Many Republicans have no love for Putin, but they follow Trump’s lead because partisanship too often eclipses patriotism. In April, 112 House Republicans voted against aid for Ukraine, defying their own Speaker and the pleas of top military and intelligence officials. They’re not all pro-Kremlin extremists. They’re just partisans in thrall to Trump. There are also still misguided “realists” who oppose arming brave Ukrainians because they fear they can’t win, or they don’t want to further antagonize Putin, or they still believe the “delusion” that America can be an island with no care about what happens to the rest of the world. We don’t need speculative works of fiction to imagine what the result will be if these arguments carry the day. Ukraine will fall. Russian troops will roll forward and be in a position to threaten NATO allies like Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Around the globe, autocrats will be emboldened and democracies will waver. The world will be more dangerous and America will be less secure. If we let that happen, if we are persuaded by cowards and demagogues to abandon Ukraine, then that surely will metastasize into wider threats to our security.
It’s important to understand that the Russians are already meddling in our politics, stirring up division, and undermining American democracy. They’ve been doing it since 2016.
Now, you may have heard that Russian interference in 2016 was a “hoax” or that Trump was exonerated of any complicity. That’s dead wrong. The investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller found conclusive evidence that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” The Senate Intelligence Committee summed it up in a bipartisan report:
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.
It still makes me angry just reading this.
The impact of Mueller’s findings was blunted and distorted by Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, who released his own misleading summary in advance to shape the public reception. But Mueller did secure thirty-seven indictments and seven guilty pleas or convictions. He documented how the Russians attacked election infrastructure in at least twenty-one states, including voter registration databases. Mueller also discovered “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.” Trump associates lied to investigators, and Trump himself obstructed justice repeatedly. He was not charged because of a long-standing Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. There was no exoneration. The only hoax was Trump claiming this was all a witch hunt.
As part of their “information warfare,” the Russians created fake groups on Facebook with deceptive names like “Tea Party News” and “Stop All Immigrants” and reached 126 million people with 80,000 fraudulent posts. Fake Twitter accounts posted more than 175,000 tweets spreading lies and propaganda—much of it then amplified by Trump allies. This operation was run by Putin’s confidant Yevgeny Prigozhin, who later played a key role in the invasion of Ukraine as head of a private army called the Wagner Group that recruited Russian convicts and sent them to kill Ukrainians. After Prigozhin staged a short-lived rebellion against Putin in 2023, he died in a not- so-mysterious plane crash. I shed no tears.
None of this is fake news. I wish it were old news. But it’s still happening. Now. In 2024.
The Russians are actively using bots, fake social media accounts, and fraudulent news websites with names like “D.C. Weekly” and “New York News Daily” to spread disinformation designed to hurt Democrats and help Trump. Artificial intelligence has the potential to make this operation much more effective, including with the use of deepfake audio or video and more sophisticated targeting. We saw a glimpse of the dangers ahead when an AI-generated robocall impersonating President Biden targeted thousands of voters in New Hampshire in early 2024 and discouraged them from voting in the upcoming Democratic primary. In that case the culprit was a rogue political consultant, but the same tools could be used by foreign adversaries with devastating effects.
The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center has warned that the Kremlin “remains the most committed and capable threat to the 2024 election,” which it sees as a “must-win political warfare battle.” U.S. security officials worry that the Biden-Harris administration’s strong support for Ukraine could prompt the Russians to step up their election interference. Making matters worse, China is following Russia’s example. FBI director Christopher Wray has said that China’s army of hackers is bigger than that of all major countries combined. Intelligence officials and disinformation experts say China is ramping up efforts to meddle in the 2024 election and damage the Democrats.
U.S. officials like Wray and General Paul Nakasone, the former director of the National Security Agency, have warned Congress and the public that this threat is urgent. But Trump and Republican allies have conducted an aggressive, well-funded, and successful campaign to prevent any real action to protect our elections from foreign interference. They’ve bullied tech companies, sued government agencies, harassed academic researchers, and blocked reforms. As the New York Times reported, “Waged in the courts, in Congress and in the seething precincts of the internet, that effort has eviscerated attempts to shield elections from disinformation.”
Republicans in Congress haven’t just left us exposed; they’ve actively amplified Russian propaganda. Most egregious is the case of Alexander Smirnov, the star witness in the GOP’s pathetic attempt to impeach President Biden. Republicans trumpeted allegations from Smirnov that a Ukrainian energy company had paid millions of dollars in bribes to Biden and his son Hunter. This was supposedly a smoking gun proving Biden’s corruption. Except it was false information Smirnov had received from Russian agents. In February 2024, federal prosecutors indicted Smirnov for lying to the FBI about Biden. They said he met with Russian intelligence officials and then started “actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections.” Smirnov admitted that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved.” In other words, it sounds like he was a plant and this whole thing was based on Kremlin disinformation.
When I hear stories like this, I think about how in 2016, the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell strong-armed Obama administration officials into staying quiet about intelligence on Russian interference in the election because he wanted to protect Trump. It was shameful and should stain the legacy of “Moscow Mitch” forever. Yet in some ways, what Republicans in Congress are doing now is even worse. They know vastly more about Russia’s campaign against American democracy than anyone did in 2016. And they’re still putting naked partisanship ahead of national security and American democracy.
“Please do not feel sorry for us,” Olga Rudneva told me. “We know what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our freedom, independence, and the right to be a country. So please be proud of us.”
Olga runs a remarkable program in Ukraine that provides prosthetic limbs to badly injured victims of Russia’s invasion. She and her team have helped thousands of wounded civilians and soldiers begin to rebuild their lives and regain their mobility after losing legs or hands in this terrible war. She’s seen the horrendous toll of Putin’s aggression—bodies shredded by shrapnel, ripped apart by land mines, and blown to bits by artillery shells. Yet instead of shrinking from this horror, she and so many others have thrown themselves into the work of helping in every way they can.
I met Olga in September 2023 at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, where she and I helped launch the CGI Ukraine Action Network, a coalition of aid organizations and philanthropies. Olga talked with me matter-of-factly about the terrors inflicted by Putin’s army. She told me how the Russians target medics and ambulances at the front lines and that, as a result, it often takes many hours for wounded soldiers to receive medical care. The long wait increases the likelihood of amputation, as even minor wounds become serious.
There aren’t enough prosthetics for everyone who’s been maimed and few rehabilitation services. Battlefield medics and clinics like Olga’s triage as best they can, focusing on the most difficult and complex cases. I have some sense of the enormous effort this takes because of my experience working with John McCain to raise money for the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which helped build a state-of-the-art rehab facility in San Antonio to treat seriously wounded service members coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. But Olga and her team are not working in a gleaming building in Texas; they’re working in the middle of a war zone.
Listening to her stories, I was amazed by the resilience of a people subjected to so much brutality. Olga told me about a double amputee who the doctors said would never walk again. The man refused to accept that fate. Now Olga sees him walking every day. “I see him planking!” she told me, adding, “He is absolutely amazing.” It reminded me of my old friend Danny Inouye, a Medal of Honor recipient who lost his arm during World War II and then represented Hawaii in the Senate for nearly fifty years. I’ll never forget Danny telling me about the painful rehabilitation process he endured and how he made it through that dark time. “I could have not just lost an arm but lost my life even if I’d stayed alive,” he told me. “But the people who took care of me, who gave me support, who taught me how to dress myself and how to do day-to-day activities, they gave my life back to me.” That’s what Olga and her team are doing every day. Not just for soldiers, but also for many civilians caught up in the indiscriminate destruction rained down by Russian bombs. And thankfully, American philanthropists like Howard Buffett have helped Olga and her team build and equip a world-class facility in Lviv to treat the wounded and provide prosthetics.
The bravery of the Ukrainians’ resistance has inspired the world, including me, as they defied the odds and fought the far larger Russian army to a standstill. But it’s difficult to sustain heroism day in and day out, especially when the world’s attention wanders, America’s support wavers, and the killing continues mercilessly and relentlessly. “Olga, what gives you hope for the future of your country?” I asked. “These people that I see every day…. They give me hope,” she told me. Patients learning to walk. To exercise. To live. Average Ukrainians continuing their lives despite everything. Mothers delivering babies. Children going to school. Workers showing up on the job no matter what. “We didn’t give up,” Olga said, “and that’s enough hope to keep moving. When you see that we are still alive? It gives you energy to keep living.”
It doesn’t surprise me that Trump doesn’t care about Olga or the people she helps—that he doesn’t care about Ukrainian democracy, the security of Europe, or the future of the transatlantic alliance. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. Beyond Trump, however, there are still Republicans who take a Reaganesque view of America’s role in the world and talk a good game about defending freedom. And I believe many of them genuinely believe it. They say the right things about deterring Russia and competing with China. But with embarrassingly few exceptions, these GOP hawks are undercutting those goals—and the values they claim to cherish—by aiding and abetting Trump’s attacks on America’s democratic institutions. The hard truth is that if Republicans won’t stand up to Trump, they can’t stand up to Putin or Xi Jinping.
Republican leaders are abandoning core tenets of American democracy even as the stakes in the global contest between democracy and autocracy are clearer and higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War. They are defending coup plotters and curbing voting rights at a moment when Russia and China are eager for any evidence that liberal democracy is a decadent failed experiment. Republicans are largely going along with the Trump-led attack on American democratic institutions and legitimacy at precisely the time when we need to set an example for the world. Some of them may be genuinely attracted to authoritarianism and disdainful of pluralism and equality. But most are making a Faustian bargain to preserve their own power at the expense of fundamental democratic norms and institutions—a move as cynical as it is shortsighted.
Think of them as the hypocrisy caucus.
Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo declared in a major speech about China in July 2020 that “free nations have to work to defend freedom.” Yet a week after Joe Biden’s victory in a free and fair election that November, Pompeo said, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” Whether he believed that statement doesn’t matter. Coming from the secretary of state standing at the State Department podium, it was a performance of authoritarian mendacity that would have made North Korean propagandists blush.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri rails often against China and has said the United States should confront a Chinese Communist Party that is “a menace to all free peoples.” Yet Hawley led the effort in Congress to overturn the 2020 election, and the image of his raised fist saluting insurrectionists on January 6 is an indelible memory of that dark day for American democracy. His reelection campaign sold coffee mugs with the photo for twenty dollars.
Senator Marco Rubio, the ranking GOP member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged his colleagues to stand up to China and “prove our democracy can work again, our system of government can function. That it can solve big problems in big ways.” Yet he helped lead a filibuster to defeat the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have strengthened a cornerstone of American democracy, and also blocked a bipartisan commission from investigating the January 6 insurrection.
One of the ringleaders of the effort to challenge the 2020 election results, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, later said what was obvious to everyone who watched the assault on the Capitol that day: It was a “violent terrorist attack.” That was enough to make him an apostate in Trump’s Republican Party, and Cruz had to beat an embarrassing on-air retreat on Fox. To regain his standing, he started pushing a bizarre and baseless conspiracy theory that the insurrection may have actually been a false flag operation planned by the FBI. Even for Cruz that was embarrassing.
Senator Mitch McConnell has no love for Trump, supports Ukraine, and has called January 6 a violent insurrection. Yet McConnell still blocked a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate it. More broadly, McConnell and his allies have pushed power politics to the breaking point in a way that has eviscerated the norms and trust that democracies need to function—most infamously with Republicans’ abuse of the filibuster and preventing President Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy. Under McConnell’s leadership, every single Republican in the Senate—every one—has consistently blocked legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, while Republican-led states pass ever more draconian restrictions on voting that disproportionately affect people of color, young voters, and poor people. Political scientists say that while these legislative tactics may lack the dramatic images of an insurrection or a coup, their effect on democracy can be devastating.
Sometimes it seems as if Liz Cheney is the only prominent Republican able to see how undercutting democracy at home makes it harder to defend it abroad. She’s a conservative Republican and the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney. Over the years, she’s said harsh things about me and advocated for policies I opposed. But she’s got her eyes wide open about the danger facing our democracy and has shown courage in telling the truth about Trump and his acolytes. Liz has paid a high price for putting patriotism ahead of partisanship, getting drummed out of office by angry Republicans loyal to Trump. But, as she told me when we met for a long conversation in the spring of 2024, democracy has to come first. Liz’s moral clarity stands in stark contrast to McConnell and many other Republicans who condemned Trump but then fell meekly back in line as he secured the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Even Nikki Haley, Trump’s rival in the primaries, who described him as dangerously “unhinged,” said she would vote for him. So many profiles in cowardice.
Back in 2021, just before Republicans ejected her from the House leadership, Liz warned that “attacks against our democratic process and the rule of law empower our adversaries and feed communist propaganda that American democracy is a failure.” That’s exactly right. Chinese and Russian propagandists jump at every opportunity to denigrate American-style democracy as leading not to freedom and opportunity but to gridlock, instability, and ultimately national decline. By contrast, they claim that their authoritarian systems, which they describe as the “true” democracies, produce better results. For example, when President Biden organized a major international summit for democracies, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs countered by putting out a report that promised to “expose the deficiencies and abuse of democracy in the U.S.” and specifically highlighted the January 6 insurrection. “The refusal of some U.S. politicians to recognize the election results and their supporters’ subsequent violent storming of the Capitol building have severely undercut the credibility of democracy in the U.S.,” the report crowed. The Chinese and Russian ambassadors published a joint op-ed assuring the world, “There is no need to worry about democracy in Russia and China,” while warning that “certain foreign governments better think about themselves and what is going on in their homes.”
The autocrats know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function, or if authoritarianism does indeed produce better results. This is more than a popularity contest. It’s a debate that could well determine whether Ukrainians, Poles, and Hungarians save their democracies or slip into an authoritarian sphere of influence dominated by the Kremlin. It could lead countries across Asia and Africa to reject China’s financial coercion and maintain control of their resources and destiny. Or it could result in Beijing remaking the global order to its own design, writing rules of the road that suit its ambitions for new technologies like artificial intelligence and erasing universal human rights long enshrined in international law.
These are the stakes of the argument between democracy and autocracy. And when Republicans undermine American democratic institutions and trash our democratic norms, they make it harder to win that argument. They make it harder for the United States to encourage other countries to respect the rule of law, political pluralism, and the peaceful transfer of power. Those values should be among America’s most potent assets, inspiring people all over the world and offering a stark contrast with authoritarians whose power depends on squashing dissent and denying human rights. Instead, America has shown the world the ugly sneers of the insurrectionist and the conspiracy theorist.
To take just one example, think about the repeated, totally unnecessary crises over the debt ceiling. Republicans in Congress have consistently voted to raise the debt ceiling with little drama when a fellow Republican is in the White House—including three times under Trump. But during Democratic administrations, they have threatened to allow the United States to default on its debts in order to extort policy concessions and budget cuts. This kind of reckless brinkmanship sends the message to our allies and our adversaries alike that America is divided, distracted, and can’t be counted on. That we are no longer a serious country.
It’s worth noting that the debate over the debt ceiling is not about authorizing new spending. It’s about Congress paying debts it has already incurred. Refusing to pay would be like skipping out on your rent or mortgage, except with global consequences. And because of the central role of the United States—and the dollar—in the international economy, defaulting on our debts could spark a worldwide financial meltdown.
I was secretary of state during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, so I saw firsthand how this partisan posturing damaged our nation’s credibility around the world. I vividly remember walking into a Hong Kong ballroom that July for a conference organized by the local American Chamber of Commerce. Congressional Republicans were refusing to raise the debt ceiling, and the prospect of a default was getting closer by the day. I was swarmed by nervous businessmen from across Asia. They peppered me with questions about the fight back home over the debt ceiling and what it would mean for the international economy. The regional and global stability that America had guaranteed for decades was the foundation on which they had built companies and fortunes. But could they still trust the United States? Were we really going to spark another worldwide financial crisis? And the question that no one wanted to ask out loud: If America faltered, would China swoop in to fill the vacuum?
I tried to reassure those businessmen the same way I did when I spoke with anxious foreign diplomats throughout that summer, confidently promising that Congress would eventually reach a deal. I repeated a quip often erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill: You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else. Privately, I crossed my fingers and hoped it was true.
Later that day, I headed to a villa in mainland China for a meeting with my counterpart, State Councilor Dai Bingguo. Over the years, I had heard monologues from Dai about America’s many supposed misdeeds, his criticisms at times bitingly sardonic but usually delivered with a smile. So I was not surprised when he, too, turned the conversation to the debt ceiling, barely containing his glee at our self-inflicted wound. I was not in the mood for lectures. “We could spend the next six hours talking about China’s domestic challenges,” I told Dai.
Fortunately, Congress and President Obama finally reached an agreement to raise the debt ceiling before careening into the fiscal abyss. But the S&P 500 still fell 17 percent, consumer and business confidence nosedived, and the government’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time ever.
Fast-forward a decade, with Biden now in the White House, and Republicans once again played the same game. Except this time, the risks were even higher. Russia and China are eager to disrupt the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency. Every time we go through this nonsense with the debt ceiling, their argument gets stronger.
