Then the news of Navalny’s death broke. Some eight years of right-wing apologism or overt support for Trump’s treatment of Putin were suddenly cast in a very bleak light.
Luckily, a number of prominent voices on the right quickly figured out an effective pivot: In this scenario, Trump isn’t Putin — he’s Navalny.
There was former New York congressman Lee Zeldin (R), replying to criticism of the Republican effort to block aid to Ukraine by suggesting that the Biden administration and Democrats were the authoritarianism-lovers.
“As the world reflects on the murder of Alexei Navalny at the hands of Putin,” he wrote on social media, “it’s worth remembering that Democrats are actively doing Biden’s bidding as they also try to imprison his chief political opponent, Donald Trump, remove him from the ballot, and ensure he dies in prison.”
Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec echoed this idea, saying that Navalny’s death was “what Biden and the Democrats want for Trump and MAGA.” Former Trump State Department official Mike Benz had a similar suggestion about the former president.
Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, fresh from having his election-fraud movie again exposed as nonsense, took a similar tack.
“Navalny=Trump,” he wrote. “The plan of the Biden regime and the Democrats is to ensure their leading political opponent dies in prison. There’s no real difference between the two cases.”
There are enormous differences between the cases, of course.
Navalny had been jailed repeatedly, both over the short term (for offenses like holding public demonstrations) and, as with his final detention, for long periods. He was sentenced to a 19-year term last August on charges of “extremism” centered on his political opposition to Putin’s leadership. The sentence came during a closed hearing at the penal colony. Russia’s justice system is widely viewed as beholden to the executive authority of the president, particularly in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Trump, by contrast, faces four sets of criminal charges. Two are federal and derive from indictments obtained by special counsel Jack Smith. Two are at the city or county level, including one in New York and one in Fulton County, Ga.
Only the federal charges could be conceivably connected to the Biden administration, but there are protections in place to afford Smith independence in seeking criminal charges. In fact, Smith was appointed soon after Trump announced his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to ensure that the ongoing federal criminal investigation into Trump’s actions was afforded that independence. (Anyone concerned about the independence granted special counsels need only consider special counsel Robert Hur.)
What’s more, the charges against Trump derive from easily comprehensible allegations: that he retained documents marked as classified at Mar-a-Lago despite legal demands they be returned and that he worked to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Neither allegation has been proved, but each has been backstopped with enough publicly available evidence to bolster the idea that an investigation was warranted.
But we should not spend too much time treating the comparison as being offered in good faith. Suggesting that Trump is America’s Navalny is simply an attempt to assert that Trump’s indictments are solely political, an argument that has been the centerpiece of all of Trump’s rhetoric for years. It was even the centerpiece of his efforts to deflect questions about how Russia attempted to boost his candidacy back in 2016.
The reality is that Trump and many of his allies see him much more as America’s Putin, the strong hand that is needed to fend off hazily defined opponents. It’s why, as president, Trump didn’t address Navalny or challenge Putin, unlike Biden. It’s why, back in 2015, Trump even defended Putin’s targeting of journalists with a Carlson-esque “our country does plenty of killing, too.”
Last September, Trump embraced another person’s effort to equate his indictments with political persecution.
That person was Vladimir Putin.
Luckily, a number of prominent voices on the right quickly figured out an effective pivot: In this scenario, Trump isn’t Putin — he’s Navalny.
There was former New York congressman Lee Zeldin (R), replying to criticism of the Republican effort to block aid to Ukraine by suggesting that the Biden administration and Democrats were the authoritarianism-lovers.
“As the world reflects on the murder of Alexei Navalny at the hands of Putin,” he wrote on social media, “it’s worth remembering that Democrats are actively doing Biden’s bidding as they also try to imprison his chief political opponent, Donald Trump, remove him from the ballot, and ensure he dies in prison.”
Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec echoed this idea, saying that Navalny’s death was “what Biden and the Democrats want for Trump and MAGA.” Former Trump State Department official Mike Benz had a similar suggestion about the former president.
Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, fresh from having his election-fraud movie again exposed as nonsense, took a similar tack.
“Navalny=Trump,” he wrote. “The plan of the Biden regime and the Democrats is to ensure their leading political opponent dies in prison. There’s no real difference between the two cases.”
There are enormous differences between the cases, of course.
Navalny had been jailed repeatedly, both over the short term (for offenses like holding public demonstrations) and, as with his final detention, for long periods. He was sentenced to a 19-year term last August on charges of “extremism” centered on his political opposition to Putin’s leadership. The sentence came during a closed hearing at the penal colony. Russia’s justice system is widely viewed as beholden to the executive authority of the president, particularly in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Trump, by contrast, faces four sets of criminal charges. Two are federal and derive from indictments obtained by special counsel Jack Smith. Two are at the city or county level, including one in New York and one in Fulton County, Ga.
Only the federal charges could be conceivably connected to the Biden administration, but there are protections in place to afford Smith independence in seeking criminal charges. In fact, Smith was appointed soon after Trump announced his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to ensure that the ongoing federal criminal investigation into Trump’s actions was afforded that independence. (Anyone concerned about the independence granted special counsels need only consider special counsel Robert Hur.)
What’s more, the charges against Trump derive from easily comprehensible allegations: that he retained documents marked as classified at Mar-a-Lago despite legal demands they be returned and that he worked to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Neither allegation has been proved, but each has been backstopped with enough publicly available evidence to bolster the idea that an investigation was warranted.
But we should not spend too much time treating the comparison as being offered in good faith. Suggesting that Trump is America’s Navalny is simply an attempt to assert that Trump’s indictments are solely political, an argument that has been the centerpiece of all of Trump’s rhetoric for years. It was even the centerpiece of his efforts to deflect questions about how Russia attempted to boost his candidacy back in 2016.
The reality is that Trump and many of his allies see him much more as America’s Putin, the strong hand that is needed to fend off hazily defined opponents. It’s why, as president, Trump didn’t address Navalny or challenge Putin, unlike Biden. It’s why, back in 2015, Trump even defended Putin’s targeting of journalists with a Carlson-esque “our country does plenty of killing, too.”
Last September, Trump embraced another person’s effort to equate his indictments with political persecution.
That person was Vladimir Putin.
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