In the week-plus before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Fox News viewers were treated to some remarkably Putin-friendly coverage. Tucker Carlson suggested maybe President Vladimir Putin wasn’t really that bad a guy and called Ukraine a “pure client state” of the State Department. Laura Ingraham called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech asking Putin to back off a “pathetic display.” Some hosts suggested the idea that Russia was going to invade was an elaborate hoax to distract from other Biden administration issues.
Then Russia invaded.
By Wednesday, one of the network’s prime-time hosts was suggesting Putin’s assassination.
Sean Hannity’s call for taking out the leader of a nuclear power is certainly highly questionable, at best — both legally and strategically. But it also represents the remarkable culmination of a rather abrupt shift in how Russia is portrayed by influencers on the right. Whatever the cause — be it hopeless contrarianism, an inability to read the situation, an effort to toe Donald Trump’s line, or simply actual conviction — it has amounted to one of the most puzzling and shortsighted efforts in recent media history.
What’s also striking about it, though, is it’s not clear there was ever really that much of a constituency for it.
Trump certainly tried to get his party to adopt a more nuanced view of Putin, and it worked to some extent. But it never really led to large swaths of the country or the party believing in Carlson’s version of Putin or turning away from Ukraine.
The story of the GOP’s relationship with Putin is, as most things are with Putin, a complicated one. And we can turn to a pollster who has regularly surveyed it — the Economist and YouGov — for insights. And while it’s been a wild ride, it’s never really been a situation in which the party seemed ready to forgive the kind of thing Putin is doing now.
Before Trump launched his campaign for president, views of Putin were somewhat akin to what they are now. Right before Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, Republicans viewed him unfavorably by a margin of 67 percent to 24 percent. The annexation did him no favors; by early 2015, the split was overwhelmingly negative, at 78 percent unfavorable to 14 percent favorable — which is almost exactly where they stand today (77 to 14).
But then Trump ran for president. He began approvingly comparing Putin to Barack Obama and saying that he’d have a good relationship with Putin.
It didn’t change things much initially; by the summer of 2016, Republicans still disliked Putin 69 to 16.
But then Trump won, and we all learned that Putin has interfered in the 2016 election to further that goal. And quickly, things changed significantly. Literally the day after we learned this in early December 2016, the Economist/YouGov poll went into the field. The results: It suddenly showed just 47 percent of Republicans disapproved of Putin, while a new high of 37 percent now approved.
Stunningly, only 14 percent of Republicans had a “very unfavorable” view of the guy who the CIA had concluded just interfered in an American election — down from 48 percent after Crimea.
But it was short-lived. Views of Putin gradually returned to the pre-Crimea mean. If there was one thing that changed, it was that those “very unfavorable” views weren’t quite as pronounced. Perhaps people were buying into some of the nuance Trump sought, without necessarily liking Putin. With Trump out of office, 71 percent of Republicans again viewed Putin negatively by last summer. The numbers were similar in January, as tensions began rising.
It was against that backdrop — combined with U.S. intelligence warning of an imminent invasion of a nuclear power into Europe — that a bunch of people decided maybe this was the time to suggest Putin wasn’t that bad, that Ukraine was negligible, or that maybe this was all overblown. Then, in short order, he invaded a sovereign nation.
And the latest Economist/YouGov poll now shows, for the first time over this entire time span, very negative views of Putin hitting majority — 61 percent of Republicans strongly disliking a guy that, just more than a week before, the most prominent conservative pundit in the country had suggested wasn’t worthy of their hatred.
