When it comes to governing, Donald Trump doesn’t have any sense of lasting loyalty for anyone, and views people as expendable. Except for one glaring exception: Vladimir Putin. Trump has made “America First” his rallying cry and foreign policy rubric. But if you take the totality of his actual foreign policy into consideration, you get a much more damning picture: Putin first.
In recent weeks, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, groveled before Putin in St. Petersburg, calling him a “humanitarian.” The administration stalled delivery of critical Patriot missiles to Ukraine, despite the fact that they’ve already been paid for. US intelligence warnings about Ukraine’s home defense have failed to reach the government there. Elon Musk throttled Ukraine’s Starlink and Starshield access during the course of Russian attacks.
And then, in contravention of recently passed US law, Trump waived Russian sanctions and struck a ludicrously lopsided “diesel deal” in which Russia supplied America with less than two weeks’ worth of fuel to offset the economic impacts of Trump’s disastrous war on Iran. For good measure, Trump also blamed Ukraine for high energy prices.
All of this is a betrayal of America’s longstanding legacy as the global security guarantor and, as we used to say, the leader of the free world. It debases America’s credibility around the world, elevates rogue petrostates like Russia to a false pedestal of great powerdom, and signals to America’s allies that the word of our president is worthless. It is a slow-rolling superpower suicide the likes of which we haven’t seen in living memory. And every day it gets a little worse.
This White House doesn’t hesitate to trash our allies and leaders of free democratic nations. Yet Trump and his cronies always stop short of criticizing Russia, or taking the necessary steps to help Ukraine win the war. All of this begs one big question: Why is Trump selling America out to Putin?
It’s a question that should keep Americans up at night, and one that we’re putting on hundreds of new billboards going up across the country. We’re spending $2.5 million on this effort, because it’s critical that people come to grips with the full scope of this administration’s coziness with Putin:
We’re also dropping a brand-new video ad that’s running nationwide, which spells out all the ways Trump has prostrated himself before the Russian leader. The ad, which will reach millions of Americans over the coming days, states the obvious: “This isn’t America first, it’s Putin first. So why does Trump keep selling out America to Putin? Americans deserve to know.”
To go along with all of this, we’re out with a new site, WhyPutinFirst.org, that contains a detailed breakdown of Russia’s hostility toward the US-led international order, and this administration’s policy friendliness toward the Putin regime.
Everyday Trump is putting Putin first. With the economy in the gutter, masked agents prowling the streets, and rampant public corruption going unchecked, it’s easy for the American people to lose sight of our self-inflicted humiliation on the world stage. We’re here to remind them that we can’t just move past these betrayals—not while there are still Ukrainians fighting for freedom on the front lines, and yearning for a helping hand from the democratic nations of the world. We owe them an answer to this question—why Putin first?—and we’ll keep shining a light until we have one.
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Home of the Brave exists to show Americans the real-world consequences of this administration’s policies, and to highlight what bravery looks like in defense of American democracy.
