The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 8, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
In a new book, journalist Bob Woodward reports that Donald Trump privately sent Covid tests to Vladimir Putin at the height of the pandemic, when many Americans couldn’t get them. Woodward also reports that after leaving office, Trump had as many as seven private phone calls with Putin. All this drew a harsh response from Kamala Harris, who pointed out that Trump kowtows to authoritarians like Putin mainly because he aspires to be a dictator himself. All this highlights something that hasn’t been front and center in this campaign: the direct connection between Trump’s authoritarian aspirations at home and the axis of autocrats internationally that are rooting for him to prevail. Today, we’re talking to Nicholas Grossman, who writes about these very issues at The Bulwark and Arc Digital and is a professor of international relations. We’re going to get into all these shadowy links and whether Harris can effectively highlight all this in the home stretch. Thanks for coming on again, Nick.
Nicholas Grossman: Sure, my pleasure. Thanks for having me back.
Sargent: According to Bob Woodward’s new book, Trump sent Putin Covid tests because Putin feared the virus. Putin told Trump not to reveal this because “people will get mad at you, not me.” What’s your immediate reaction to this?
Grossman: Putin’s right in that he was right to probably want to try to keep it secret. It is another example of how Trump clearly has a strong affinity for Russia, for Putin, even both in personal activity, in rhetoric; and sometimes—even in foreign policy, high-level national security foreign policy—has deferred or even kowtowed to Putin’s point of view and put Putin above what is commonly understood to be interests of the United States of America.
Sargent: Well, before we get into that, I want to remind everyone that Trump was downplaying the seriousness of the disease at the time, saying it was like a cold. Countless people died, including many in red states. Trump didn’t encourage people to get the vaccine during his final months in the White House, then quietly got it himself without doing it in front of the cameras, which could have been an example to people. So Trump takes care of himself, he takes care of Putin, meanwhile his own people are dying. Doesn’t this go to the core of what this type of autocrat is really about?
Grossman: It does, and it shows how Trump’s policy for many things, and actually another example is with Hurricane Helene currently, is that his approach to crises is not to try to address them. It’s to lie to the American people about them. His big concern has been his reputation, not, in any particular way, the interests of the United States. The authoritarian governments often will lie, sometimes very blatantly lie, not just for the purpose of trying to convince people, especially its followers, of something false. It’s also to try to attack any authoritative sources of truth, independent sources of information, and to make it where what is true is just whatever they say, no matter how crazy, and then anything they say is false is false. That also creates a degree of a cultlike loyalty around them. We’ve seen this in a number of both flat-out authoritarian countries, Russia in the worst case, North Korea, and also a number of democratic backsliding countries like Hungary, which Trump and a lot of MAGA admire.
Sargent: Autocrats in crisis situations really, they’re not exactly trying to persuade people that what they’re seeing around them isn’t there. It’s more like they’re creating a world in which you make your own truth. I mean, isn’t that the essence of this type of autocracy? Appropriate the power to make your own truth, even if it’s staring everyone in the face?
Grossman: Yes, and especially if it’s staring at everyone in the face, because that adds to the assertion of power. This is the answer to why people like, say, Bashar Al Assad of Syria, when they fake an election, give themselves like 99 percent of the vote? Everybody knows that they didn’t really get that much, and they know that everybody knows, but it’s also an additional way of saying, Look, we can lie right to your face, and none of you can do anything about it, because that is the power that we’re able to wield with this.
There’s also an irony of the term strongman … because a lot of the times they’re pretty darn weak and incompetent. So where they try to sell themselves as I can fix everything, what they’re really selling is, I will tell you that it is fixed, and I will tell you that anything that is going bad is the fault of whoever it is that we already hate. Therefore you can direct your anger at them and yet we’ll actually do worse in terms of the actual functionality of addressing disasters, whether something like Covid, or like hurricanes with disaster relief, or like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s really interesting. That’s exactly what Trump did when he was in the White House. He didn’t try to solve the Covid crisis. He said, I will tell you that it’s not there. Let’s listen to Kamala Harris’s response to this news on the Howard Stern show. She said this.
Kamala Harris (audio voiceover): Donald Trump has this desire to be a dictator. He admires strongmen and he gets played by them because he thinks that they’re his friends. And they are manipulating him full time and manipulating him by flattery. And with favor. And so, to your point, as reported by Bob Woodward, in the height of the pandemic—and remember, and your listeners will remember, people were dying by the hundreds—everybody was scrambling to get these kits, the tests, the Covid test kits, couldn’t get them. Couldn’t get them anywhere. And this guy who is president of the United States is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator for his personal use?
Sargent: Note that Harris takes this occasion to remind people of how terrible Trump’s final year was, which voters have apparently forgotten. But Nick, I want to ask you about her larger claim here, which is that Trump and MAGA are in an alliance with Putin and all their authoritarian strongmen in which they basically agree on the type of governance that they think is good. And they explicitly see themselves as locked in a struggle against liberal democracies over the future. Can you talk about that deeper stance and what’s really driving it?
Grossman: It’s an effective transnational alliance of antidemocracy right-wing authoritarians. I want to say effective alliance because I want to be careful here; I’m not alleging any grand conspiracy or some collusion where they all met and plan on this together. Rather, it’s a convergence of interest. It’s something where they see themselves all largely independently but with a degree of admiration for each other as opposed to things like democracy, as opposed to “wokeness.” A lot of what the American right admires about Putin in Russia or Orbán in Hungary or some of these other authoritarians is that they are anti-gay, they’re anti-Muslim, they crack down on speech that they don’t like, they crack down on things like academics who are criticizing them, for example. These right-wing forces, culture-warrior forces in the United States see Putin as a champion of traditional masculinity, and traditional Christianity, which is also somewhat ironic because Russia is not especially religious. If you want to live in a religious Christian traditional society, there are pockets of America where you can find that much better than you can find in Russia.
Trump recently said that the United States’s biggest enemy is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s this “enemy within.” That is the same sort of thing that a lot of these authoritarians say and where they boost each other in reputation and in sharing each other’s lives and in denouncing the same sort of perceived enemies who often are cultural minorities, women, gay people.
Sargent: I thought Harris really artfully got at this kind of synchronicity, if you will. She really essentially said that Trump admires Putin and wants to do the same thing here that Putin did there. Don’t you think? This is an argument that’s a little hard to get across to people, but I’m glad she attempted it, aren’t you?
Grossman: Yeah, I am, very much so, because a lot of this got muddied up in the Trump-Russia story, in both the intricacies of the story itself, of the fact that a lot of it was in the murky area of intelligence and involves some classified things that the government didn’t disclose, and the incessant lying that Trump and his allies did about it to try to present it as if it was only the weirdest conspiracy theorists that you saw on the internet. That’s the entirety of Trump-Russia as opposed to a real Russian intelligence operation. Much as that one was a similar element of convergence, we can see it’s clear that Trump personally admires and in some way is envious, is jealous of Putin, and wants something like that. And he’s pretty darn open about this. Like when he praised the Chinese Communist Party for crushing protests at Tiananmen Square violently, when he talked about how great that was. Or when Russia invaded Ukraine. Trump’s first comments on it was that it was, and these are direct quotes, that it was “savvy and genius.”
Sargent: Harris also really got at something important as well about these autocrats: that they’re just fundamentally cowardly figures when it really comes down to it. Did you notice that?
Grossman: I thought that was really good. And also because of the irony of the term strongmen, that usually they are cowards, they’re personal cowards. They have other people do stuff for them. Even Trump is a good example of this. He didn’t fire people personally; he would either tweet about it, not to their face, or have somebody else do it. Or would make a bunch of bluster against, for example, North Korea. Then when North Korea called his bluff, then start doing what was basically P.R. for North Korea and kissing up to them.
I thought the other thing that Harris did today that was really good was announced that she will not engage in any peace talks with Russia without Ukraine present. Russia had been arguing that what’s going on in Ukraine is really Russia versus the West or versus NATO and Russia is the victim here. That is a frame that Trump and Vance and allies like Elon Musk or Tucker Carlson often adopt, that Russia-friendly frame, and also treat it as if Ukrainians don’t have agency, as if they’re just this plaything for the U.S. and Russia. That is Russian propaganda.
Sargent: To your point here, the other piece of news from Bob Woodward is that Trump and Putin very likely have had more private calls than we know about. Putin is gambling big-time on a Trump win. He thinks that it’ll mean American military aid ends, giving him free rein to gobble up Ukraine. I know this is speculative, Nick, but what do you think Putin might be talking to Trump about? Is it possible that Trump is making Putin promises about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy later? Or are they maybe discussing what Putin can do to influence the election here? What’s the worst-case scenario? What does that look like?
Grossman: I don’t know, of course, and with the general wariness of this is speculation, I can’t think of anything that could possibly be good. But is [there] any explanation for it that could possibly be good? There is no precedent for this at all that a former president in regular private conversation with a foreign head of state, any foreign head of state, is—but especially one that is actively hostile to the United States, that is on the other side of a very big war, and with Trump seeking office again. This isn’t Jimmy Carter or George Bush Sr. doing some hurricane aid or something in a foreign country or being a presidential envoy on request. Nothing like this thing has really happened.
Once it pops my head, they’re possibly talking about the election, what to do about it, talking about future plans for Ukraine and how to give it away to Russia. Also, there were the national security secrets, classified documents that Trump stole and then lied about and refused to get back up to the point that the FBI had to get a search warrant to go back and get them from Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago. That would be the sort of thing that Putin or the Russian government would be very interested in. Any discussion of foreign policy or campaign strategy, anything having to do with money laundering, that there have been.... This is a recent example, of Trump selling those Trump watches for $100,000 and the website itself even saying that the watch you get might not be the one that’s pictured here and they might not be sent right away. That seems like a giant send-me-bribes-and-we’ll-launder-them-this-way sign; that you can buy them in crypto, another way to say launder it. I don’t want to claim that I know what they’re talking about or that they have something specific going on, but every possible thing I can think of, there is nothing that serves the interests of the United States. I don’t think it serves the interests of American democracy.
Sargent: I want to play this response to the news from JD Vance. At a rally in Michigan, Vance said this.
JD Vance (audio voiceover): Have I talked to Donald Trump about his calls with Vladimir Putin? No, I’ve never had that conversation with Donald Trump in my life. But if Donald Trump, even if it’s true.... Look, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?
Sargent: Nick, the idea that Trump would be holding these personal calls with Putin in order to advance the cause of peace is pretty funny. Vance himself recently laid out his idea of peace between Russia and Ukraine, in which Ukraine doesn’t get any of its territory occupied by Russia back and is allowed to maintain independence in downsized form in exchange for not joining NATO. Your thoughts on that?
Grossman: There is a degree to which Trump and Vance and those that agree with them are advocating for peace in Ukraine. They’re advocating for Russian victory, which would, granted, make peace. One of my all-time favorite quotes is about war, from the famous military strategist [Carl] von Clausewitz. And he says, “The aggressor is always peace-loving; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.” I always love that line because it’s true. You need somebody fighting back to get a war. What they want in Ukraine is peace, but it’s one in which Russia gets any of the territory that it’s currently holding; Ukraine doesn’t get any territorial concessions. Ukraine has to promise, and other countries also have to promise, that Ukraine doesn’t get to make its own foreign relationships. Moscow effectively gets to veto that. That more or less accepting that, some degree that we can call an independent Ukraine exists, but the Ukrainians really belong to Russia, and everybody just says, they’re not a real country and agrees with the Russian government stance. Of course, the Europeans, the U.S. national security establishment all hate that because that would mean taking ... and the Ukrainians, of course, absolutely despise it and refuse to do it because all that they are getting in return is a promise from Putin, a promise of peace from somebody who started this war, could stop it at any time but keeps going, and who has already made promises to them.
For Ukrainians, this war goes back to 2014 when Russia took Crimea, not just 2024, and they signed agreements—this is called the Minsk agreements—and Russia never really followed them. That was also a degree of land for peace that Russia got some of the land that it controlled. And in 1994, they had a treaty with Russia called the Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. And neither time they did. So a savvy take on this would be that Russia is lying again and that they would merely try to reconsolidate their forces and try again for more when they are in a better position to do so. Trump and Vance’s idea is not just to try to weaken the Ukrainians to the point that they quit and bow down to Putin but also to expose a lot of Europe.
Sargent: Vance ties Trump and MAGA to Elon Musk and all these other edgelord tech oligarch types. We’ve seen Elon Musk act crazy on the stage with Trump at a rally just a few days ago, and Vance confirming at the veep debate that he would have helped Trump overturn the election. To me, what these things indicate is that the global authoritarian far right is, in a sense, really going for it now. They think this is their moment to defeat liberal democracy. If they can win this election here, this global movement gets an immense boost. Are they right about that?
Grossman: Yes. I hesitate to say that because I don’t want them to be right, but yes, they’re absolutely right. Also, [it’s] important to be cautious; that if they lose this time, that doesn’t mean that they’re defeated forever and that’s the end of it. That they are very stubborn, extremely stubborn and determined people; it is one of their superpowers, largely without shame, just keep coming and coming. And so I don’t think it would go away entirely, but this U.S. election is a major fork in the road for both the United States and for the world because the degree to which the United States effectively switching sides from being a definitely imperfect but generally on the side of democracy and flipping to being generally on the side of authoritarianism with the Russia-Ukraine war being the most immediate salient example.
It would also, by getting Trump elected, would send this immediate bolt of fear through democracies worldwide, especially Ukrainians in Europe, Ukrainians and the Europeans more broadly, would be the biggest ones to start, frankly, panicking. It would be a big shot of morale to Russia and to Putin and to other autocracies around the world, but especially to Russia, of thinking this is what they’re gambling on. This is their lifeline for trying to win the war that they’re having trouble with. Whereas if Harris gets elected, in many ways people are underestimating this, it would be the inverse. It would be a giant shot in the arm for pro-democracy forces worldwide, domestically and in various ones around the world. It would be a serious morale blow to the Russian military, to any others that are counting on Trump winning.
Bibi Netanyahu in Israel is another good example of this, who clearly wants Trump to win and thinks that Trump would give him more of what he wants and is hoping for that. MBS in Saudi Arabia and some of the others ones, especially ones that had successfully manipulated Trump and found that they didn’t actually need to give anything to America. They just needed to give something to him personally, and he would do what they want, even if what they wanted included hurting America, like for example he did with North Korea and normalizing North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
Sargent: To wrap this up, is there some way for Harris to really talk about those bigger stakes that you just laid out about how Trump’s kowtowing to Putin and other dictators? She did really lay bare well in that interview, but it’s really about the authoritarian rule that Trump craves here and how all these other dictators are rooting for that to succeed. Is there some way she could draw that out a bit more?
Grossman: So as a campaign strategy, I don’t know, which is that I don’t really know if I have my finger on the pulse of undecided voters and what is the thing that is going to make them go undecided. I’m a foreign policy voter. I really like that part. It appeals a lot to me. I think it might potentially appeal to maybe some of the wavering national security conservatives, some who might want to write in somebody who’ve always been a Republican. The national security ones are the biggest of the never-Trump ranks. They’re the ones that were appalled by Trump kissing up to Putin, for example, and bailed early. While at the convention, I loved it when Harris said, just point-blank, that these dictators are rooting for Trump because it’s true, and because that’s bad and the dictators are right to want to have him in there.
There’s quite a bit that can be drawn out about lying. Do you really want to be just lied to all the time, or do you really want the United States to be both despised and mocked and also thought of as very weak around the world? But I don’t know how much that sells voters. The type of foreign policy discussion that we’re having that I’ve run into, people talking about strength and the idea of what they mean of Trump is strong, meaning that he blusters on television and that other people might not think of that as strong. I try explaining how what foreign countries are worried about is things like the might of the U.S. military, not how the president looks in a speech on TV. But for people who are voting based on those vague vibes, then I don’t know. I think that answer was kind of unsatisfying (laughs). Can the campaign draw it out more? Yes. The will that sway undecided voters? I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the thing that gets to them.
Sargent: It’s a really tough dilemma because it’s so hard to figure out exactly what’s going to finally push these undecided voters one way or the other. I do think Harris is trying to feel her way toward these bigger topics here with that takedown that she offered. I don’t know if it’s quite there, but I’m really hopeful that she can draw it out more. Nick Grossman, thanks so much for coming on with us today.
Grossman: Sure. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.