The day Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to attack Ukraine, his allies in the U.S. right-wing media parroted his justification for war, suggested Putin was an ally in the U.S. culture wars, and, of course, blamed the whole thing on President Joe Biden.
Fox News hosts, former Trump White House staffers, and an ex-Democratic congresswoman who’s fully embraced far-right faux-populism all piled on amid reports that Russia was attacking military targets all over Ukraine, not just the two oblasts in eastern Ukraine which Russia has formally recognized as independent republics.
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Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who interviewed former President Donald Trump on her show Wednesday, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech asking for peace “a really pathetic display,” and suggested that the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia led Putin to attempt to annex part of eastern Ukraine.
“Russia collusion and the tens of millions of dollars spent on that ridiculous Mueller investigation, we’re paying the price right now,” Ingraham said. “The world is paying the price right now.” Ingraham said that Trump wanted to de-escalate conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and that she “lay[s] the blame at the feet of the people who tried to hound him out of office.”
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and Blackwater founder Erik Prince, meanwhile, yukked it up about Putin’s well-documented persecution of LGBTQ+ people. “Putin ain’t woke, he is anti-woke,” Bannon said. “The Russian people still know which bathrooms to use,” Prince said.
Bannon added that Russian citizens “don’t have pride flags,” while Prince made a transphobic joke about University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas.
Trump himself, meanwhile, told Ingraham that the war happened because he lost the 2020 election. “It all happened because of a rigged election,” Trump said, repeating his lies about his re-election defeat. “This would have never happened.”
Ingraham’s fellow Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose Tuesday monologue was so pro-Russia that it ran on Russian state television with Russian subtitles, followed that up Wednesday by criticizing the White House, congressional Republicans, and liberals in the U.S. media who’ve said that gas prices will increase due to the conflict. He also pulled in a number of other evergreen grievances, such as COVID vaccines.
“‘Standing up for our values is not without cost,’ says the gender studies major from Oberlin College,” Carlson said, referring to White House press secretary Jen Psaki. Later, while criticizing CNN contributor John Avalon’s assertion that “we need to stiffen our spines a little” to “stand down authoritarianism and autocracy,” Carlson questioned how American liberals define “liberal democracy” and “international order.”
In a tweet posting his monologue, Carlson wrote: “Ukraine isn’t a democracy, it’s a State Department client state.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and 2020 presidential candidate who’s been a frequent contributor on Fox News over the past year, later appeared on Carlson’s show to criticize the Biden administration’s plan to sanction Russia.
In a Wednesday tweet, Gabbard wrote that Russia would not have attacked Ukraine if the U.S. and NATO “had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border.”
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