Marjorie Taylor Greene is having a hard week.

On Tuesday, the Georgia Republican reacted to news that President Donald Trump has decided to send billions of dollars in offensive weapons to Ukraine and is considering a secondary round of punishing tariffs on Russia. The Financial Times reported that Trump even asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky if he could strike the Russia capital of Moscow if the U.S. were to provide the means. The ATACMS, a supersonic rocket platform, is apparently under consideration.

“MAGA did not vote for more weapons to Ukraine,” Greene tweeted. “MAGA voted for no more US involvement in foreign wars.”

Unfortunately for Greene, MAGA voted for all those things when it voted for Trump. That’s not a dig at MAGA, however, because liberals also misunderstood the president on this score. 

Like everything else about Trump, the truth of his foreign policy record is occluded by mythology. MAGA thinks of him as an isolationist or a dove, while liberals see in Trump an agent of Vladimir Putin. Setting aside whatever business dealings the president or his family may have in Russia or with Russians, Trump’s record here is remarkably hawkish.

In an interview with UnHerd, Fiona Hill, a former senior National Security Council official, revealed that despite Trump’s occasionally friendly rhetoric toward Putin, his administration oversaw a continuation of the anti-Russia status quo that has long been the norm in D.C. Hill noted that Trump “didn’t pull back from some of the actions that were taken against Russia behind the scenes, things that nobody really talks about. Nobody really saw.”

That reality was drowned out by a hysterical media that saw Trump and Putin as the best of friends. But the rhetoric never matched the reality, and that is reflected in Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine, going back to the early days of his first administration.

Trump agreed to deliver Ukraine $47 million worth of offensive weapons in December 2017, including 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 37 launchers. The sale was completed in March 2018. A few months later, Trump’s State Department announced it would provide an additional $10 million in military financing to strengthen Ukraine’s naval capabilities against Russia after a small dust-up between the two countries.

On March 3, 2022, Trump said that his reaction to a war between Russia and Ukraine—a country formally outside the security umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—would be to bomb Moscow. On March 12 of that same year, Trump bragged about having sent nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine and highlighted that, unlike previous administrations, he provided Ukraine with lethal weapons like Javelin missiles.

“Remember that with Ukraine, I sent the Javelins that you see are so effective against the tanks,” Trump said.

“Biden didn’t and in fact he ended our last order,” he said, positioning himself as more of a Russia hawk than either Biden or Barack Obama.

On March 21, 2022, Trump floated the idea of deploying submarines armed with nuclear weapons into Russian waters as a way to intimidate Putin. Trump did not truly strike dovish notes on the war until the following month, and only because he knew it was what his base wanted to hear. He said Russia and Ukraine should work out “some kind of an agreement,” and everyone seemed to forget everything that he had said before about a game of nuclear chicken.

What Greene considers a betrayal is just a return to form for Trump. Indeed, he promised that he would do exactly what he’s doing now while campaigning for re-election.

In a 2023 interview with Fox News, Trump was asked how he planned to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in 24 hours, as promised.

“I would tell Putin, ‘If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give [Ukraine] a lot, we’re gonna give them more than they ever got if we have to,” he said. “I will have the deal done in one day.”

Greene must have missed that answer. Though it should have been harder for her to miss the aid that Trump helped pass through Congress last year as the head of the GOP.

You might recall that Speaker Mike Johnson pushed additional aid to Ukraine in the form of a loan, even if that meant working with Democrats to get it done. The truth is that the aid package was Trump’s idea, as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina admitted.

“This would not have passed without Donald Trump,” Graham said. “President Trump has created a loan component to this package. It gives us leverage down the road.”

Journalist Michael Tracey described MAGA’s reaction to Trump’s role in that push as a “code of silence,” whereby everyone pretended that it wasn’t happening and that he wasn’t involved. Tucker Carlson, for example, carefully avoided criticizing Trump and instead targeted Graham, presumably out of fear of upsetting his Trumpworld connections by being a little too honest.

On top of all the above, you also have to remember that Trump’s first administration was a boon for the military-industrial complex. His second is shaping up to be that way as well, with Silicon Valley defense startups muscling their way into D.C. under the Trump administration.

I can understand why people who consume misleading media (like Carlson’s shtick of continuously finding scapegoats for Trump within his administration) would be confused and frustrated about what’s happening now. But there’s no excuse for ignorance from politicians like Greene, who know better and feign shock anyway.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/maga-is-getting-the-ukraine-aid-it-voted-for