York: For one leading Democrat, Trump, Musk and Putin paranoia merge

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy is one of the Democrats urging his party to more aggressively resist President Donald Trump across a broad range of issues. "Mr. Murphy has seemed to be everywhere all at once since Inauguration Day," wrote The New York Times recently, "staging a loud and constant resistance to Mr. Trump at a time when Democrats are struggling to figure out how to respond to him."

Murphy has exhibited the usual resistance obsessions, focusing furiously on Trump, on DOGE head Elon Musk and on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. And now, as Murphy devotes his energy to trying to stop the president's effort to bring peace to Ukraine, he has combined all those fixations into a sort of grand unified theory of Trump – what he calls the "bigger story."

Murphy explained the theory in an appearance on CNN on Sunday. Trump and Musk, he said, are scheming with Putin to "transition America into a kleptocratic oligarchy" in order to enrich themselves, "steal our data, to steal our Medicare, to steal our Medicaid." It was a bizarre formulation, and when Murphy finished, the CNN host, Dana Bash, diplomatically said, "There was a lot there."

Hopefully most Americans do not share Sen. Murphy's conspiratorial worldview. For example, most do not believe that longstanding efforts on Capitol Hill to curb the skyrocketing costs of Medicare and Medicaid are a Kremlin plot. They also don't think there is a grand scheme to transition the United States into a kleptocratic oligarchy.

Do many Democrats hold that view? It's not clear. But it is clear that if Murphy plays a leading role in his party's response to Trump, Democrats will fall into the same Russia mania that characterized the resistance in Trump's first term in office. "The White House has become an arm of the Kremlin," Murphy declared on CNN. "Every single day, you hear, from the national security adviser, from the president of the United States, from his entire security team, Kremlin talking points." How is the president to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war with domestic opposition like that?

There was a moment in the Oval Office meeting when a reporter asked Trump what his message was for Europeans who worry "that you align yourself too much with Putin." Trump responded: "Well, if I didn't align myself with both of them, you'd never have a deal. You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, 'Hi, Vladimir, how are you doing on the deal?' It doesn't work that way. I'm not aligned with Putin. I'm not aligned with anybody. I'm aligned with the United States of America."

Trump won the presidency by pledging to pursue American interests above other interests. What he said in the meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a concise restatement of his campaign theme. After the blowup, someone tweeted words to the effect, "What did y'all think America First meant?" It meant what the world saw in the Oval Office.

What Sen. Murphy seems unable to understand is that the Trump plan could well be the best path forward for Ukraine, which is in a terrible position after being invaded by Russia, is now in its fourth year of war, and is totally dependent on outside aid. Just two days before the Zelenskyy meeting, Trump told reporters, "I've had very good conversations with President Putin. I've had very good conversations with President Zelenskyy. And until four weeks ago, nobody had conversations with anybody. It wasn't even a consideration. Nobody thought you could make peace. I think you can."

Then a reporter asked, "But if Mr. Putin gets to keep the land that was claimed by force, if the Russians get to keep the territory that they claimed by force, doesn't that send a dangerous message to China about Taiwan?"

"You try and take it away, right?" Trump said to laughter around the room. "We're going to do the best we can. We're going to do the best we can to make the best deal we can for both sides. But for Ukraine, we're going to try very hard to make a good deal so that they can get as much back as possible. We want to get as much back as possible."

Analyst Michael Lind recently wrote that Trump's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine fits into a long tradition of American presidents — from Lincoln to FDR to Eisenhower to Johnson and beyond — dealing with wars and aggression around the world. Perhaps there are good reasons to oppose Trump's Ukraine strategy, Lind wrote, "But to be consistent, moralists who invoke American ideals ought to condemn FDR and Churchill for agreeing to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe that lasted half a century after 1945. And they must condemn Eisenhower and Johnson for failing to take significant action to punish the Soviet Union from crushing democratic rebellions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. ... American statesmen in every generation usually are guided by considerations of the national interest in their dealings with other major powers, including those whose internal regimes are repugnant to American principles."

"I'm not aligned with anybody. I'm aligned with the United States of America," Trump said. The point is, Trump's plan, or at least what we know about it, is a reasonable way to approach a terrible problem in Ukraine. It is not a Russian conspiracy. If the political opposition were able to judge it on its own terms, rather than hysterically hypothesizing about Kremlin talking points — and it is not clear that Sen. Murphy would ever be able to do that — they might see it as possibly the best way out of a bad situation.

This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/with-visit-biden-makes-things-worse-on-border.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.