Transcript: Humiliated Trump’s Anger at Putin Grows as GOP Angst Rises

Young: Right. There is a view, which I think is fairly convincing to me, that at least when Putin was starting out as the Russian leader, he didn’t necessarily have an ideology beyond self-enrichment and the magnification of his own power. But he’s been using this Russian imperial ideology as a cover for his actions because he has to justify his autocracy somehow. And I think it’s entirely possible…. I can’t get inside his head—and it’s not a particularly pleasant place to be, I’m sure—but I think it’s entirely possible that he has gotten into the role to such an extent that he really is buying into [it himself]. Like, what’s the expression, huffing his own supply, right? That’s entirely possible. I think at this point, he really is serious about the ideology.

But whether he’s using the ideology as a cover or for the expansion of his power or sincerely believes it is really almost irrelevant, because the upshot of it is that, and I think that’s pretty clear, he needs the war at the moment as his raison d’être politically. What else does he really have to offer the Russian population at this point? He’s whipping up this war hysteria, [which] unfortunately does seem to be working on a fairly large portion of the population, although in an autocracy it’s really difficult to say to what extent polls reflect the accurate state of public opinion. But I think there’s also a view that for him to end the war right now would actually be hazardous because he’d have a lot of disaffected soldiers coming home, basically saying, Well, wait a minute, what was all this for? What did our friends die for? So I think he may be in a “holding the tiger by the tail” position where even if he wanted to end the war, he knows that it would be very dangerous to him domestically.

Sargent: Well, we’ve got Republicans in Congress—a small group of them anyway—that are now pressing to escalate pressure on Russia, really breaking with Trump. Trump has made noises about maybe he’ll entertain sanctions, but it seems to me that Trump has basically always been either entirely indifferent to the fate of Ukraine or actively rooting for Russia to win. So how much longer can Trump disguise his actual position here? He’s got Republicans saying that it’s time to escalate the sanctions. Trump himself is admitting, without meaning to, that his efforts have failed. Russia’s doing what he has told them not to do, right? So Trump is failing according to his own account. So how much longer can Trump sustain this position where he’s essentially admitting that he’s not getting his way but saying, I’m going to walk away, as his people are saying? Where does this go from here? Trump clearly doesn’t want to be seen failing. This is why he’s raging so furiously at Putin right now. Yet he also says, I’m going to walk away, which he thinks, I believe, that he could wash his hands of this and somehow not be perceived to have failed—but everybody would know that he failed. So where does this go? It just seems like a deeply contradictory position.