Perhaps because it is not just news but a catastrophic and epochal shift, the Trump administration’s ongoing project of casting off democratic allies and embracing autocratic adversaries has not received nearly the coverage it merits. Certainly it hasn’t provoked sufficient outcry or resistance from the Democratic Party. But Donald Trump and MAGA’s open efforts to ally the United States with Russia and far-right European parties is not some abstract political game without impact on ordinary Americans. It is a perverse project to put the United States on the side of dictators and oppressors, because Donald Trump sees such countries and rulers as his natural allies, sharing a common interest in the idea that might makes right, and that the powerful should be free to plunder the powerless. As Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, puts it, “The US switching sides in the world, from pro-democracy and rule of law to anti-both — most immediately seen in helping Europe against Russia to helping Russia against Europe — is the biggest, most profound change to the international system since the USSR collapsed.”
This schism in American identity has been particularly visible in a series of grotesque tableaux over the last few weeks. There was Defense Secretary’s Pete Hegseth’s visit with our NATO allies, to whom he delivered the message that they are basically not actually our allies, that the U.S. would not be involved in any peace-keeping missions in Ukraine following a future ceasefire, and that any European troops deployed in such missions would be outside the NATO umbrella of mutual support should they be attacked.
As if Hegseth’s visit were merely the amuse bouche to a full wrecking-ball MAGA entrée, Vice President JD Vance then arrived on the continent, delivering a speech that painted far-right European forces as oppressed agents of democracy, and European efforts to fight extremism as more dangerous than a potential Russian invasion. It was an up-is-down, night-is-day presentation that included a tacit endorsement of Germany’s extreme far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is highly sympathetic to Russia and draws political inspiration from the Nazis. As if this did not send clear enough a signal, Vance also met with the AfD’s leader while shunning a meeting with German chancellor Olaf Scholz. As the New York Times described the moment, “Eighty years after American soldiers liberated Dachau, top German officials this weekend all-but accused Mr. Vance — and by extension, President Trump — of boosting a political party that many Germans consider to be dangerously descended from Nazism.”
It is difficult to overstate the horror of Vance’s remarks. As the German chancellor remarked in response, “A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD.” The moral vacuity of Vance, and MAGA, has rarely been on more vivid display as the vice president of the country that helped destroy Nazism told the Germans that it’s time to let Nazi’s inheritors back into power. And Vance’s rationale was superficially inane but substantively unsettling, as he claimed that opposition to immigration meant the AfD was reflecting the democratic will of voters (reality check: the AfD is polling support from about 20% of the German voting public). Yet Vance’s claim of democratic legitimacy for the AfD excludes the parts of its agenda that are not so democratic or compatible with the open, liberal society that Americans associate with democracy — the demonization of non-German ethnic groups, the support of political violence, the participation of some of its members in literal attempts to overthrow the German government. As Washington Post columnist Lee Hockstader put it, “It’s one thing to oppose unbridled and illegal immigration, which has inspired anger and despair in the United States and Europe. It’s another to traffic in symbols and slogans that were proscribed by postwar German lawmakers specifically because they feared a revival of Nazism in its birthplace, and were determined that Germany would forbid it.”
And then, completing the banquet of MAGA international awful, we witnessed the Trump administration’s moves to embrace Russia, most prominently by working with Putin’s government on a peace plan for Ukraine that excludes. . . Ukraine. These efforts were accompanied by a blatant attempt by the U.S. to shake down Ukraine in exchange for American assistance, with the Trump administration trying to get that country to agree to give up something like half a trillion dollars’ worth of mineral rights. It is hard to overstate the bad-faith, exploitative twist-of-the-knife malignity that this offer entailed, as if the U.S. would only help Ukraine via a deal that robbed that country of its wealth, in an approach that many rightly called out as colonial in nature.
And so I return to a basic point I tried to make last time. Even conceding that most Americans do not follow closely what happens overseas, and that there is some sense in Democrats wanting to make sure they’re seen as engaged with the priorities of working Americans, there are still a few foreign policy issues that can’t be ignored as not worth the effort. The way that Donald Trump is working to pervert the role of U.S. power in the world, to ally our collective wealth and might with that of countries and movements that are adversarial to our most basic, majoritarian beliefs, requires far more attention, outrage, and repudiation than it’s currently receiving. JD Vance endorsed a neo-Nazi party, which is not just offensive in itself, but provides a harsh and needed gauge as to how far right the Trump administration truly is — so far right that it thinks that it’s time to put back in power the spiritual successors of the German psychos who brought so much of the world to ruin eight decades ago. Stating the fact that the Trump administration would have the U.S. ally itself with neo-Nazis is both morally correct and politically potent. It speaks to a deep sickness in MAGA, a dark worship of intolerance and a politics of dehumanization, of exclusion, of dominance; seeing what MAGA looks like when Germans are doing it could potentially alter Americans’ perceptions of this movement.
And if invocations of the Holocaust and mass murder strike some Democrats as playing too harsh a card against Trump, then perhaps they should open their perspective a bit more to take in what’s happening in Ukraine at the hands of MAGA’s top ally Putin — where that dictator’s armies are committing war crimes, engaging in ethnic cleansing, and otherwise prosecuting an unprovoked war for the greater glory of Mother Russia. The violence promised by these far-right forces that MAGA sees as allies is already upon the world. Donald Trump, in aligning the United States with perpetrators like Putin, is trying to make every one of us complicit with murder, with hatred, with the triumph of the warmongers over those who just want to live their lives in peace. At a smaller scale, it’s the same mentality that he’s currently trying to promote at home, where peaceful immigrants are labeled as an invading army, where a tiny minority of trans Americans are scapegoated as an existential threat to home and hearth, and where women and minorities are disparaged as “DEI” hires should they happen to hold positions of authority.
M. Gessen, who has written extensively on the nature of authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia, recently offered an assessment of the Democrats’ response to Trump’s efforts to destroy constitutional democracy in the United States. One observation in particular struck me: they noted that while Democrats are understandably attacking Trump for breaking the procedural rules of American democracy, this line of defense has significant limitations. After all, Gessen points out, Trump is simply going ahead and doing things that Democrat say he can’t. Noting that “Admonitions to obey the law will not stop Trump and will not dissuade his supporters,” Gessen goes on to counsel that “Trump’s bad ideas must be countered with good ones.”
I think this insight can be applied to Trump’s destruction of our alliances and tentative construction of what we might call a “MAGA Axis of Evil” connecting Trump-ruled Washington, far-right European parties, and Putin’s Russia. There is very little Democrats can do directly to stop Trump from conspiring with Putin and cheering on Germany’s neo-Nazis. However, there is a lot they can do to talk about the world-historically bad ideas that are propelling Trump, and his engagement with these traditional enemies of America. Most Americans know that Nazis, ethnic cleansing, and suddenly treating countries like France and Germany as enemies is wrong at a basic level. And so the Democrats have a stark backdrop against which to promote ideas that might otherwise feel more abstract — such as the importance of having allies, why worries about immigration don’t justify putting neo-Nazis in power (in Germany or elsewhere), why it’s self-destructive for the United States to ally with war-mongering countries like Russia, and how it’s far better to ally with fellow democracies.
Such an articulation of basic ideas about the world is all the more crucial as MAGA acolytes like VP Vance twist ideas of democracy to justify their authoritarian alliances. For instance, in his baleful European speech, Vance asserted that illiberal forces like the AfD are truly democratic because they have voters’ support, while pretending that attempts to defend elections against misinformation and Russian meddling are actually anti-democratic. MAGA and its supporters understand the importance of maintaining at least a veneer of democratic legitimacy; it is in the interest of democracy’s defenders to deny them this veneer, and to speak straightforwardly about how actual democratic societies are open ones that promote solidarity, compassion, and mutual aid.
Democrats can’t expect to revive and maintain a stronger, more democratic international order in the future if they can’t bring themselves to start articulating a vision of it; and their fight to save democracy at home will be all the harder if they can’t persuade the public that the country shouldn’t be corrupted by alliances with anti-democratic forces abroad.