Putin Wants 'Trump 2024' to Salvage His War, But He May Get Twin Barrels of U.S. Congressional Buckshot to the Face Instead

While a Victorious Trump May Try to Hand Ukraine and More Over to Putin, New Management in Both the House and Senate May Put an Ironclad Kibosh on the Best Laid Schemes

This week marks 13 months until the 2024 U.S. Presidential and Congressional election. Unlucky 13 it’s most certainly been for Ukraine’s defense-aid outlook after U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted by the Putin-sympathizers in his own party for negotiating with Democrats to keep the U.S. Government open. Mind you, he was booted from the majority leader position even after he left more Ukraine defense funding out of the continuing resolution that passed the House and Senate. It’s terrible for Ukraine, but not insurmountable, considering how much in frozen Russian reserves can be deployed and how broad the global aid coalition has proven to be.

The real test will be in 13 months’ time, and it seems that everyone working towards a free and prosperous Ukraine has a healthy fear of Donnie Trump returning to the White House, and what it would mean for efforts to help against Russian aggression.
Even if Trump does win, the pronounced pro-Ukraine bias of many GOP Senators — and the stark risk of the House outright flipping to Democratic control — mean that a second term for Donnie could be met with two chambers of Congress staunchly opposed to his twin brands of Putinism and Ukraine-defeatism.

The Senate is really the key piece of this tripartite moving puzzle — and that’s mainly because it’s expected to flip into Republican control. To anyone watching U.S. electoral politics in the frame of the Russia-Ukraine war, it might seem that giving Republicans control of the Senate on the eve of the invasion’s third year will be a death knell for Ukrainian freedom and very existence. Letting Mitch “Enabler-in-Chief” McConnell set a legislative agenda dictated by a Trump White House could easily become an exercise in seizing on the U.S. Southern border and slashing Pentagon lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine.

The major barrier to that is that McConnell is part of a wider group of mainly older, more senior GOP Senators who fully realize the stakes in Ukraine and Eastern Europe overall. He could even be considered the leader of a group that includes but isn’t limited to current GOP whip Juhn Thune (SD), Lindsey Graham (SC), Chuck Grassley (IA), Thom Tillis (NC), Jon Cornyn (TX), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Susan Collins (ME), Marco Rubio (FL), John Barrasso (WY), Jim Risch (ID), Markwayne Mullin (OK) and Steve Daines (MT). Seven of the names listed above are currently the ranking members of either permanent or special/non-standing Senate committees, meaning they will be first in line to assume the gavels in those committees and decide which legislation will see the light of day in full-Senate votes. It’s worth noting that Thune could very well become Senate Majority Leader in January 2025 should McConnell suffer one too many brain freezes.

To pose this possible Senate vs White House situation as a binary conflict: on one side, a possible president who will be trying to gut Ukraine funding in any spending bill that could possibly come up, and on the other, a group of senators who want to see funding go through and who have enormous power versus the White House in terms of what gets a vote. It may be true that Ukraine is clearly not a top-5 issue to American voters overall, but I guarantee it’s much more important in the Senate – and would be even more so in the event of a Trump presidency.

While the Senate has a full list of defeatist “surrender monkeys” to match their couperparts in the House GOP, their tools for and desire to prioritize the stonewalling of aid to Ukraine pales in comparison to what the more senior and more committed GOP Senators can and will do. Will Rand Paul lead a delegation to Moscow to praise Putin’s military failures? Are Rand et al. going to sacrifice numerous legislative priorities of their own — which will be at high risk of being tabled by pro-Ukraine Senate GOP leadership under the kind of spiteful horse trading that goes on in D.C. — just to be able to vote no on Ukraine funding? Remember that for this entire kind of break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario, Senate GOP help will only be needed if the Republicans can flip the Senate and Donnie Trump wins another term.

One can be slightly relieved about the Senate’s resolve to aid Ukraine’s defense after the 2024 election, and it looks even better for Ukraine support in the U.S. House heading towards the 119th Congress. Eleven House races are rated as too-close-to-call tossups, with seven of those 11 seats currently held by Republicans. Furthermore, 18 GOP seats have to be defended in districts that Biden won in 2020. That opens the door for a House under Democratic leadership to set the tone for Ukraine aid.

It bears mentioning that I don’t agree with assessments that claim Americans overall support more aid — I think that likely voters more often follow the Fox-n-Facebook narrative that “maybe Ukraine is part of Russia anyways,” or that “the aid is too expensive.” I expect the numbers that show U.S. support for Ukraine among the electorate to decline as the war drags on. However, because the Ukraine issue isn’t a priority for voters, are Democrats going to lose their seats for funding Ukraine? Not likely. They are much more likely to win or lose based on other issues like the economy, immigration, crime or Social Security and healthcare votes/policies.

This entire scenario must be viewed through a lens that colors the U.S. as a mainly right-of-center, suburban/exurban gerontocracy itself. That reality has led us to the current crisis in the House — which includes both Speaker McCarthy and continuing-resolution Ukraine funding getting the ax. That may delight and embolden the Trumpers and Putinites in the U.S. electorate who want to see Ukraine fail. But they may be missing the point that a very specific subset of the U.S. Senate’s gerontocracy has a completely opposite view of what the U.S. Government’s legacy in Ukraine should be — and that there’s a pro-Ukraine bloc among the House Democrats waiting to help them no matter who’s in the Oval Office.