Let there be no doubt — the Republican Party can’t seem to get their message straight about Ukraine and Russia because many Republican lawmakers sat idly by and watched Donald Trump sell out our allies to appease Putin. 

While President Biden stands strong with our allies to hold Russia accountable, Republicans are at war with themselves:

Washington Post: Opinion: Trump never met a dictator he didn’t praise. Yet his fans dare to accuse Biden of appeasement.

• “Only a blinkered partisan would describe Biden’s approach as appeasement. His approach is more accurately characterized as muscular diplomacy. Biden is actually continuing some Trump policies that made sense while avoiding his predecessor’s volatility, incoherence and praise for strongmen.”
   
• “Republicans bellyache but offer few, if any, alternatives. Indeed, they can’t even get their story straight: At the same time that many Republicans are accusing Biden of being too weak on Russia, Tucker Carlson and the #MAGA grass roots are accusing him of dragging the United States into a needless war with ‘nuclear-armed Russia.’ What a surprise: The Party of Trump is too intellectually incoherent to offer a consistent foreign policy message.”

Washington Post: Opinion: Tucker Carlson’s pro-Russia rants give Republicans exactly what they deserve 

• “Tucker Carlson has created a thorny dilemma for Republicans running in 2022 primaries: How can they cast President Biden as ‘weak’ on Russia and Ukraine when the nation’s most-watched right-wing TV commentator is enforcing a new orthodoxy suggesting that the U.S. must not defend Ukraine against Russian aggression in any way, shape or form?”
   
• “The problem for Republicans under Carson’s influence is they want to keep attacking the Democratic president’s posture as ‘weak.’ But Carlson has complicated this by requiring them to oppose doing anything at all toward Russia in defense of Ukraine.”
   
• “So Carlson’s pull on the GOP base is far more pernicious than merely being a new ‘isolationism.’ But regardless, in denying Republicans the space to reflexively blame the Democratic president for ‘weakness’ without saying how they would handle an intensely complex geopolitical situation, it’s giving them exactly what they deserve.”

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