Trump and Putin – Still Best Friends?

Chronicles of a romance

Vladimir Putin is a careful man—careful with the truths he tells and the truths he hides. Donald Trump, on the other hand, lies fluently and often. So when Trump and Putin start using the same kind of language and adopting similar postures, it’s a good idea to take note.

Putin has now started talking about how the 2020 U.S. election was “stolen”—and if it hadn’t been, then the war, sorry, “crisis” in Ukraine could have been avoided. Those words were, of course, lifted straight out of Trump’s spoilt fantasy about Joe Biden cheating him out of the presidency that year—his tone more reminiscent of a child whose ice cream was snatched on the school bus than a U.S. president.

But the language of politicians matters—bigly… as Donald Trump would put it. Both men’s choice of vocabulary points strongly towards a growing alignment in the way they project power and craft their spin for the global public.

Putin seized Crimea in 2014 because he wanted it, then took additional bites out of Ukraine after the West failed to react. Trump, meanwhile, wanted to take a bite out of Greenland—and apparently threw his toys out of the pram when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told him no.

The Russian buys into the “stolen election” nonsense not because he believes it, but because he’s telling the world that he and Trump are back together again. Old best friends, becoming new best friends.

Of course, the warming relations between the two men may stand the test of time. But what if they don’t? Short-tempered and aggressive, each is really quite capable of stealing the other’s ice cream on the way home from school.