US-Russia relations: Is Putin playing Trump 'like a fiddle'?

To provide historical context to the peculiar relationship between US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, let’s take a stroll down memory lane, back to 2018 and Helsinki, where Trump’s courtship of the Russian dictator began in earnest. At a news conference after an unusually secretive two-hour meeting, not even note-takers were allowed, the question of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections came up.

US intelligence concluded in 2016 that Russia was behind an effort to tip the election in Trump’s favour with a state-authorised campaign of cyber attacks against Hillary Clinton. A reporter asked whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or Putin, who had denied any kind of interference. “President Putin says it’s not Russian,” Trump responded. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Reaction from American officials on both sides of the political divide was fierce. Arizona Republican John McCain, one of the most senior and experienced members of Congress, termed the response a “disgraceful performance” and said “no prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”

Similar harsh comment came from several other senior Republicans. The Democratic minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said that siding with Putin against American law enforcement and American intelligence agencies was “thoughtless, dangerous and weak.” Just hours after the joint press conference, a prominent Kremlin critic, Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, coined the phrase “Putin is playing Trump like a fiddle.” The phrase went viral on the Internet and shaped the perceptions of many in the foreign policy community.

The phrase gained fresh currency in October, when critics of both parties objected to Trump easing sanctions on Russia and concluding a deal with Putin to import hundreds of thousand tons of Russian diesel. Its high price is a prominent topic in the campaign for control of Congress in mid-term elections next month. (Nov.3)

Widespread anger over high prices for diesel, gasoline and grocery are widely expected to cost the Republicans their slim majority in the 435-seat House of Representative and possibly the Senate as well. The sharp rise in the cost of living is largely the result of Trump’s war of choice on Iran which retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz which carries a fifth of the world’s oil. The resulting shortages have affected economies around the world.

Trump is not known for accepting responsibility for anything that goes wrong and therefore is trying to rewrite history, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries for the high price of fuel. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, social media postings and impromptu remarks have left little doubt that in the longest war in Europe since World War Two, the American president’s sympathies have been more with Putin than with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.

In the alternative reality of the White House, Zelensky provoked the war and missed multiple opportunities to end the fighting. Putin is the victim in the conflict. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump told reporters. “They haven’t been doing much.” This is a hard story to sell, particularly as Russia has been hammering Ukraine’s power grid with 170 attacks since mid-October. Neither Russia nor Ukraine observed a three-day “energy ceasefire” Trump declared they had agreed on. Rather than being an agreement between the two, the “ceasefire” looked like a unilateral declaration by Trump.

His erratic handling of the Russia-Ukraine war deepened the anger of several Republicans enough to speak out. On CNN, Republican senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said: “Russians are lying. Putin is lying. Putin is playing Trump like a fiddle. And history is not going to look good on an America that failed to rise up and defend the Western world if Putin actually gets his way.”

Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire echoed the “playing like a fiddle” theme. Foreign policy topics tend to have little impact on American voters. But they do when filling up their cars cost two dollars more per gallon than before the Iran war. A steep drop in Trump’s approval rating reflects their disenchantment. At 31 percent, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, it is the lowest since he took office in his first term.

How worried Trump is about the elections has been highlighted by the fact that he has campaigned for Republican candidates even in deeply conservative states, including Kansas. The last time Kansas elected a Democratic senator was in 1932. But despite the bleak outlook for Trump’s party, he told a rally in North Carolina he was confident that the Republicans would defy history and the midterm odds. What are they? The incumbent party has lost seats in the House of Representatives in 36 of the last 39 midterm elections since 1946.