By Tamar Jacoby
I’D BEEN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND the rationale for months: Why is MAGA America so opposed to U.S. support for the war in Ukraine?
At first, I thought I’d find the answer in foreign policy magazines and journals. I started reading about the history of American isolationism and parsing the speeches of politicians like Senators J.D. Vance and Lindsey Graham. I even thought I might write a journal article myself, analyzing and refuting these wrongheaded but reasonable-sounding arguments.
But all along something told me that I was barking up the wrong tree. The GOP base voters I encountered seemed so bitterly angry and so dug in—there had to be something beyond rational arguments about fiscal conservatism and comparative assessments of Chinese and Russian threats.
Then, a few weeks ago, I stumbled on a video that took my breath away. A reporter had gone to a Trump rally and wandered among the crowd asking people how they’d feel if Russia won the war, destroying Kyiv and wiping Ukraine off the map. One woman made clear she had no objection to the invasion or the killing of Ukrainians: “That’s fine,” she asserted truculently. “That’s fine with me.” An older man whose hat read “Vietnam Veteran” agreed: “I don’t think Putin’s the problem. I think Zelensky’s the problem. . . . Putin is trying to save his country from the likes of idiots like Zelensky and the elitists.” Another man in line outside the rally drove the point home: “This [Biden] administration’s trying to start a war with Russia. Russia’s not our enemy.”
What else was hiding under the rock, I wondered, and at first I was afraid to look. But then I spent a few days on Truth Social and other far-right sites. I did no systematic research—just an informal canvas of the MAGA mind. But I’ve come away far more scared than I was before about what might lie ahead for U.S. foreign policy.
