Trump and Putin: Reflections on the U.S.-Russian Victimhood Alliance

Donald Trump is dismissive of most world leaders. The biggest exception is Vladimir Putin. The question is why.

What explains the Putin-Trump axis?

There are two primary sources for the Putin-Trump kinship. The first is that both leaders share a very personal sense of victimhood.

In his youth, Trump suffered under the constant bullying and dismissive treatment by his father.

And even after he became a successful developer, Trump was never admitted into New York high society, who found him vulgar, provincial and uncultured. That clearly rankled him – as did a variety of his unsuccessful business ventures which confirmed his father’s view that Trump was a failure.

Two men suffering a great deal of bullying in their youth

Putin who, very much unlike Trump, was born on the proverbial “wrong side of the tracks,” also suffered a great deal of bullying – in his case of the neighborhood variety, not the paternal one.

At the time, there were no indications that the diminutive youngster would ever turn into a future Russian leader.

Putin learned judo to defend himself and joined the KGB to feel more powerful. But even in the KGB he was often passed over, marooned in a dead-end posting in Dresden where he was spying on West German tourists.

Personal slight and world politics

The unfortunate consequence of these two men’s early lives is that they are now both in the position to use their respective nation’s destiny as a vehicle to make up for the fact that they were both on the receiving end of bullying as boys.

To be sure, Trump and Putin compensating their very personal sense of victimhood and indignity by projecting it onto their nations and the world is a powerful motivating force.

Putin showed Trump the way

Beyond Putin having shown Trump the way to translate personal peeve onto the national and the world stage, the other source of the Putin-Trump axis is that, in effect, it was Putin who invented MAGA – a Russian version of MAGA, of course.

As the name implies, MAGA harks back to some mythical past when the United States of America was great. In Trump’s telling, that America was destroyed by evil leaders such as the Clintons, Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden – all men who allowed Canada, Mexico, China, the European Union and the rest to rob, rape and pillage the United States.

Just blame others

This is precisely the line Putin started to feed the Russian people long before Trump announced his first run for president.

Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. He blamed Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and accused the West of duping Russia by expanding NATO to its borders.

Nostalgia for the past and resentment of the present

Both Russian and American versions of MAGA are based on nostalgia for the presumably glorious past and resentment of the present.

Putin was the first to tap into this well of resentment, in his case among the Russian people – and Trump, inventing nothing new, merely followed in his footsteps.

But having become leaders of the movement they created, both faced a problem: If Trump’s and Putin’s political success depends on their supporters’ resentment, why would they want to improve their lot and make them happy?

Why making Russia or America Great Again is a sham

That’s why the part about Making Russia or America Great Again has always been sham.

Putin has talked about recapturing Russia’s past might, but so far it has not worked very well. On the contrary, Russia’s former colonies are rejecting it.

He has made enemies of Georgians and Ukrainians, he prompted Poland, the Baltic States and other Central European nations to boost their armies and, in the latest blow to the Make Russia Great Again project, former client state Armenia has decided to seek EU membership.

Russia’s import substitution strategy a complete failure

Nor is Putin rebuilding Russia’s industrial base. The Skolkovo high-tech park, which was supposed to rival America’s Silicon Valley, lies in ruins. Its founder has been accused of embezzlement and has fled abroad.

Since 2014, Putin has talked of import substitutions and even declared that Western sanctions imposed after he invaded Ukraine were beneficial for the Russian industrial base.

Yet, Russia still imports pretty much everything it needs – except it now has to go by a circuitous, more costly route. Russia’s industrial rebuilding has been such an abysmal failure.

Bringing back manufacturing jobs to the United States?

As for the U.S. President, despite all the rhetoric, Trump does not have any intention of bringing back manufacturing jobs to the United States. After all, if Americans are happy and no longer resent the rest of the world, MAGA will disappear.

That is why the goal of the tariff war Trump unleashed is not at all about restoring the United States’ manufacturing prowess, but to distract the American public from paying attention to the real game in town – passing the disastrous Trump tax and budget package.