MAGA partisans will forget how Trump backed Russia’s evil | Opinions
Russia today is every bit the “evil empire” that Ronald Regan named the Soviet Union in 1983 to derision from the press and Democrats. The New York Times called it “the worst presidential speech in history” in a lead editorial. Democrats running for president a year later denounced it, too, calling Reagan a dangerous war monger, unembarrassed by the fact they were echoing Soviet propaganda.
When Donald Trump clapped for former Soviet KGB agent Vladimir Putin earlier this month as he approached on a red carpet, the sides had changed, but the division in America and Europe had not. Trump’s switch from pressuring Russia to end the violence to instead pressuring Ukraine to accept a partition of the country will go down as one of those moments in which who is siding with evil became crystal clear.
Such a moment was on display in 1980 when the United States led a boycott of the Soviets’ Moscow Summer Olympics. Despite the communists’ unprovoked invasion of Afghanistan the year before, today’s NATO European Ukrainian allies’ athletes trooped to Moscow anyway — Italy, France, England and Spain among them. One reason Italy, France and Spain were lukewarm in their support of a boycott is that open communists were part of their national parliaments.
Obama, Biden did little for Ukraine
It is pretty clear today that historians will not look kindly on the last three presidential administrations’ inept and sometimes counterproductive handling of a new evil Russia. Barack Obama did little when Russia took Ukraine’s Crimea. Joe Biden only slowly allowed newer and more advanced arms to trickle to Ukraine after first refusing offensive weapons, then refusing air power and then long-range weapons, resulting in a relatively frozen conflict.
While both Democrats were weak, nothing they did went as far as Trump in siding with the invaders. Now Trump, after a little tough talk calling for a ceasefire, has adopted Russia’s position on ending the war, putting pressure on Ukraine to cede 20% of its territory in return for peace and security guarantees from Europe, the United States and Russia. Never mind that the Russian and U.S. security guarantees issued to Ukraine in the 1990s deal for the country to give its nuclear weapons weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.
Last week, European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to get Trump back on track, but largely failed as Trump pushed ahead promising an imminent meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy to make more progress on peace. Now Russia’s foreign minister has said that is not on the schedule.
In the future, it is at least comforting we’ll all know who was right, right? Well, I think maybe not. Just as the sides were confused in the Cold War and now the MAGA crowd has lost the plot of this new struggle, it is amazing what a capacity we have to forget uncomfortable facts.
Angela Davis: wrong on Cold War, human rights
A perfect example of this forgetting is Angela Davis. Who could have been more wrong about the Cold War than someone who joined the Communist Party in California in 1968 and later during the 1980s ran for vice president as a Communist twice? She consorted with communist dictators the world over, most notoriously visiting East Germany’s dictator, receiving an honorary degree and being awarded the Star of Peoples’ Friendship complete with hammer and sickle. There she gave a speech lauding the human rights record of East Germany and the Soviet Union. There she turned the reality of human rights on its head to great applause.
Needless to say, she opposed every step taken by America’s leaders, Republican or Democrat, to win the Cold War with the evil empire for decades.
Today she is not reviled as a fool and a tool of evil. She is regularly feted and held up as a model for the young by the very institutions that are supposed to teach young people about the nature of good and evil and the history of the Cold War.
Cambridge, the prestigious university that supports Ukraine over the evil Russia, awarded her an honorary degree in June. She was paid to appear at the Ivy League’s Cornell just this February, months after appearing at Swarthmore. In 2024, she received the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her work in opposing the prison industrial complex. In 2023, she was featured on PBS. In 2022, Spellman College gave her an honorary degree. In 2021, a university in Barcelona awarded her an honorary degree. Soon we’re supposed to get a biopic.
This month, the American Studies Association gave a prize named in her honor. It is described as an award to scholars who follow Davis’ footsteps using their work to do good, as backing the Soviet Union was “doing good.” They promote “the development and dissemination of interdisciplinary research on U.S. culture and history in a global context,” but just happen to have forgotten the history and global context of Davis’ role giving aid and comfort to the enemy during the Cold War.
Sometime soon, when we all look back on the struggle between the West and Russia over Ukraine, when it is exactly clear who were the good guys and the bad guys, who lived up to their responsibilities and who let the world down, I am sure the last three feckless presidents will be lining up for their accolades. To their partisan backers, the facts about their mistakes won’t matter a bit, just like Angela Davis’ friends forget all the evil she helped promote.
David Mastio is a national columnist for McClatchy and The Kansas City Star.
This story was originally published August 26, 2025 at 12:46 PM with the headline "MAGA partisans will forget how Trump backed Russia’s evil | Opinions."
