After its historic guilty verdict in his hush money case, donald trump attacked the US criminal justice systemmaking unfounded claims of a “rigged” trial that echoed the Kremlin’s comments.
“If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said Friday, speaking from his namesake tower in New York on Friday. Thousands of miles away, Russian President Vladimir Putin was probably “rubbing his hands with joy,” said Fiona Hill, former White House senior national security adviser to three U.S. presidents, including Trump.
Hill and other analysts say Trump’s attacks could be useful to Putin and other autocrats as they seek to improve their standing among their own citizens, potentially influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the position overall of the United States. influence.
Some autocratic countries reacted quickly in support of Trump.
Moscow agreed with Trump’s assessment of Thursday’s verdict, calling it “elimination of political rivals by all possible legal or illegal means,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. In September, Putin said Trump’s prosecution was a political vendetta that “shows the rot of the American political system.”
After the verdict, Hungary’s populist, pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called Trump a “man of honor” and urged him to “keep fighting.”
Chinese state newspaper Global Times suggested that Trump’s conviction adds to the “ridiculous nature” of this year’s US presidential election, adding that it will aggravate political extremism and end in “more chaos and social unrest.”
Putin is especially likely to see the latest turmoil as an opportunity, analysts say. He has long sought to widen divisions in Western societies in an attempt to promote a Russian worldview. Since the invasion of Ukraine, and on the eve of crucial elections across the West this year, Russia has been accused of carrying out multiple sabotage attacks and of attack dissidents abroad to stoke anxieties and sow discord.
Moscow was accused of meddling in the 2016 US election that Trump won by creating a troll factory, Hack Hillary Clinton’s campaignspreading fake news and trying to influence Officials linked to Trump.
“What mischief does he have to do when there are people within the American system itself denigrating and tearing it down?” Hill said of Putin.
Political chaos can benefit autocratic leaders by distracting Washington from key issues, including the war in Ukraine. Russia’s goal is to move voices “from the margins of political debate to the mainstream,” said David Salvo, Managing Director of the Alliance to Secure Democracy at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, DC.
The Kremlin does this in part by pushing Russian views under the guise of news and social media posts that appear to originate in the West.
Salvo noted that disagreements in Congress that delayed a aid package to Ukraine came after a Russian social media campaign targeting Americans. That led to Russia takes the lead On the battlefield.
Attacks on the American justice system by Trump and his allies They are “perfect fodder” for another “major propaganda and influence operation,” Hill told The Associated Press, suggesting Russia could target undecided voters in battleground states ahead of the November election.
For generations, American presidential administrations have described the United States as a bastion of democracy, free speech, and human rights and encouraged other states to adopt those ideals. But Trump suggested that the justice system is being used to persecute him, something that happens in some autocratic countries.
Leaders including Putin “must like” that Trump is criticizing “the key institutions of democracy” in the way autocratic states have done for years, by legitimizing them in the eyes of his own people, Graeme Robertson said. , professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Trump sees himself as a “strongman ruler” and looks to Putin for inspiration, Hill said. His attacks encourage any nation, from those with a mild grievance to the openly hostile, to “have their moment to topple the colossus,” Hill said.
The message to Chinese and Russian citizens watching the drama unfold in the United States is that they are better off at home. The message to the countries Russia and China are courting as they try to expand their influence in Africa, Asia and Latin America is that Moscow and Beijing can offer more reliable partnerships.
The threat from the “new axis of authoritarians,” which includes Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, is “daunting” as those states work more closely with overlapping interests, said Matthew Kroenig, a former defense official and vice president of the Atlantic Council. Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
Moscow in particular, Kroenig said, will likely try to use political turmoil in the United States to split the NATO security alliance. It could try to turn the public in NATO states against the United States, encouraging them to question whether they have “shared values” with Americans, she said. If successful, that could lead to a fundamental reshaping of the global security architecture – a goal of Russia and China – since the end of the Cold War.
Meanwhile, some Western governments are caught in a delicate dance between not wanting to exclude Trump as a possible next US president and the need to respect the US justice system. Others, like EU member Hungary, openly court him.
“For Putin it must be perfect because it creates a mess that he can try to take advantage of,” Hill said.
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Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu in Hong Kong contributed to this report.
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