In the face of the Trumpist Republican Party's legislative sabotage of US aid to Ukraine, it took Poland's leader to finally say out loud what many in Europe were quietly thinking, after Congress once again blocked the $60 billion (around €56 billion) military aid package crucial to Kyiv. "Dear Republican Senators of America," wrote Prime Minister Donald Tusk on his X account on Thursday, February 8. "Ronald Reagan, who helped millions of us to win back our freedom and independence, must be turning in his grave today. Shame on you."

It is important to consider the huge cost to a Polish politician of denouncing the immoral US conduct by the US, Warsaw's much-revered ally. But the Poles have that respect for history that Donald Trump and his troops undoubtedly lack. CIA director Bill Burns has more of it, as a connoisseur of Eastern Europe, where he has lived. On January 31, he said that abandoning Ukraine would be a mistake "of historic proportions" for the US, he said.

Ronald Reagan, president from 1980 to 1988, must have turned in his grave a second time on Saturday when Trump, his distant successor in the White House who is campaigning to return there, broke the US pledge to protect its European allies if they didn't increase their defense budgets. Worse was to come: In one of those demagogic slogans that are such a hit at election rallies, he encouraged Russia "to do whatever the hell they want." This is the same Russia, an aggressor state waging a war on Ukraine the likes of which Europe has not seen since 1945, simply because the Kremlin considers Ukraine to be its own. "No other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator," Joe Biden said indignantly on Tuesday. "For God's sake, it's dumb, it's shameful, it's dangerous, it's un-American."

What a turnaround! Neither B-movie actor Reagan nor real estate mogul Trump was destined to become US president, but that's where their similarities end. Trump's Republican Party has nothing in common with Reagan's. At the end of the Cold War, this resolutely internationalist party supported opposition movements in the Soviet bloc and constantly called for the release of imprisoned dissidents. Has anyone heard Trump calling for the release of Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny, who is serving his 19-year sentence in an Arctic prison camp?

'Useful idiot'

On the contrary. Tucker Carlson, former star of the conservative Fox News channel and Trump champion, went to Moscow to conduct a televised interview with Vladimir Putin, whom he says "not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview" – forgetting that two fellow American journalists are currently imprisoned in Russia for no reason other than doing their job. The two-hour interview was broadcast on X, owned by naturalized American billionaire Elon Musk, who is convinced that Putin "has no chance" of losing the war in Ukraine.

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