When I first heard President Donald Trump’s words on the tarmac—when he blamed Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for starting the war that Russia launched against Ukraine—I was absolutely shocked.
I was shocked because I liked what President Trump was saying in the last months of his campaign trail in 2024. He promised to bring back common sense, and in many ways he has. He brought back common sense by resisting Woke dogmatism which, to me, looked like neocommunist ideology conquering more and more public spaces in the United States.
President Trump has also brought back common sense to the Middle East, where we in Israel have had to live for too long with a double standard that treats terrorist organizations on an equal level with our democracy—and where appeasing Iran was considered the best way to preserve peace.
But this is exactly why I was so surprised that Trump seems to have adopted the rhetoric of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. He repeated a line from the Kremlin that sounded like Soviet-style propaganda: that Zelensky is not a legitimate leader. When Putin, the seemingly eternal leader of Russia, says it, it is laughable. When the president of the United States says it, it’s alarming, tragic, and does not comply with common sense.
To say that Zelensky is a comedian is tantamount to saying President Ronald Reagan was nothing more than a Hollywood actor. Reagan was a Hollywood actor, but he became the leader of the free world and defeated communism. Similarly, Zelensky was a comedian, but he became a hero of historic proportions in the fight for Ukraine and the free world. When the free world was paralyzed by Putin and his threats of nuclear war, and Putin invaded Ukraine in order to conquer it in one week, Zelensky united the country and stopped the invasion. Today, Ukraine’s struggle against Russia’s imperial ambitions protects the future of the free world.
President Trump’s statement is equivalent to an American president in the Cold War approving the Soviet assault in the Prague Spring, because the stability of the communist regime is important for the stability of the world, or because a few Czech extremists have allegedly caused the conflict.
I can only imagine what the political prisoners and dissidents in Russian jails are feeling today. Only a year ago Alexei Navalny was killed by Putin in one of his prisons. Before he died, Navalny wrote me a few letters in which he said that what he saw in Russia’s prisons was the same world that I once experienced as a prisoner in the Soviet Union.
But I think that in some ways it is worse for the political prisoners in Russia today. We had the advantage of knowing that President Reagan was on our side. But what should the hundreds sent to Russian prisons for many years for daring to call out Putin’s aggression feel today?
I hope that President Trump will take the course of common sense and make it clear that he is against Russian aggression. Because a world where an American president supports Vladimir Putin is a dangerous place.
