Here’s the result from the feed in plain text:
News that the Trump administration had agreed with Russia to try to negotiate a peace settlement for Ukraine, without including Ukraine in the talks, was a revelation that many believed reversed years of efforts to isolate Moscow.
But prominent voices in the right-wing media world interpreted the development this week as cause for celebration.
“Every day has kind of felt like Christmas morning, hasn’t it?” Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor who is poised to run Voice of America, said during a podcast interview. “President Trump wants peace for every nation.”
Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA and podcast host who has more than 4.6 million followers on the social media platform X, praised the discussions as “a breath of fresh air.”
And Jack Posobiec, a die-hard Trump loyalist perhaps best known for spreading the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, invoked the title of Mr. Trump’s 1987 best-selling book. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said on his podcast, “it’s the art of the peace deal.”
They are among a growing pool of Trump-aligned media figures who have become among the harshest critics of American strategy in addressing Russia’s war in Ukraine, deeming the Biden administration’s efforts wasteful, detrimental to national interests and, ultimately, futile.
Now that Mr. Trump is back in charge, many of those same right-wing voices have functioned as a supportive chorus, cheering the president’s unorthodox approach of directly engaging with Russian leadership and creating a media narrative that runs counter to the deep unease expressed by the foreign policy establishment.
That increasing numbers of Republicans are falling in line with this once-fringe view is a testament to Mr. Trump’s ability to bring his Republican Party to heel on nearly any issue, even one that upends its previously hawkish stance toward Russia.
Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise to end the war in Ukraine, and over the past week he has pushed the matter to the top of his agenda. On Wednesday, he disclosed a surprise phone call with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, which Mr. Trump characterized as the beginning of peace negotiations.
A day after the call, Tucker Carlson dedicated large portions of a live interview with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary — himself a darling of the American right — to the war and its potential resolution.
Mr. Orban told him, “Donald Trump already changed the mind-set of the whole Western world.”
Source link
