Putin’s Favourite President

As a fresh CIA review shows, Donald Trump still remains Vladimir Putin’s most useful ally in the West.

Vladimir Putin, hardly a man to tolerate inconvenience, recently excused himself mid-event to field a call from US President Donald Trump, lest the latter take ‘offence,’ or so Putin claimed.

The hour-long call between the two men focused on Russia’s unending war with Ukraine, Iran and Middle East tensions. It yielded no breakthrough, only bromides. And yet, it underscored a strange and durable bond between Putin and Trump. It affirmed that Trump remains the only Western leader who continues to command such theatrical deference from the Kremlin. More worryingly, it signalled the return of an American presidency more aligned with Russia’s worldview than with its own intelligence agencies.

It was in 2016 that American intelligence agencies concluded the Kremlin had reportedly interfered in the US election to tip the scales in Trump’s favour. The findings, backed by all major intelligence services, have been consistently affirmed, including in a fresh CIA review released this past week. That review, commissioned by Trump’s own former CIA director, John Ratcliffe, tried to poke holes in the original assessment. It instead ended up reaffirming that Russia interfered, and it did so with the aim of electing Trump. The report noted “procedural anomalies,” but its substance was that Russia’s preference for Trump was calculated and clear.

Trump’s contempt for these conclusions is longstanding. He has derided them as a hoax, attacked the intelligence agencies that produced them, and elevated conspiracy theories to muddy the waters. His quarrel with the CIA’s former chief, John Brennan, was ideological. Brennan embodied the analytic, bureaucratic and stubbornly empirical that Trump, who preferred flattery and fealty, so distrusted. And in Putin, he found both.

The courtship has paid dividends for Russia. Trump questioned NATO’s relevance, sought to withdraw US troops from Europe, and resisted efforts to punish the Kremlin after its annexation of Crimea. His first term had left the West divided and dazed, which suited Putin’s long game. Trump’s relationship with Putin has always defied normal metrics of diplomacy. It is a study in asymmetric admiration. Putin’s cold authoritarianism has long mesmerised Trump. In Putin, he sees not a geopolitical rival, but a kindred spirit who is unbound by institutional constraints, unbothered by scrutiny and unrepentant about the use of power.

The Kremlin understands this well. Theatrics aside, Putin’s entire strategic doctrine, shaped by years of Soviet collapse and Western expansion, hinges on weakening the cohesion of liberal democracies. As historian Anne Applebaum notes in Twilight of Democracy, the 21st-century authoritarian does not need to defeat democracy militarily. He only needs to convince its citizens that their institutions are irredeemable, their elections illegitimate, and their allies expendable. Trump has done that work more effectively than any Russian cyber-unit ever could.

The US intelligence community, already battered by Trump’s past purges and public scorn, now faces an existential dilemma. How can it speak truth to a president who sees truth as negotiable and loyalty as transactional? Trump’s second term may offer fewer institutional guardrails and more attempts to politicise intelligence, diplomacy and national security with even less resistance this time around.

The call with Putin, then, was not a minor diplomatic courtesy. It was a signal to the world that the Kremlin still sees in Trump a president who does not just reject the Washington consensus but actively undermines it. From the viewpoint of Trump’s many detractors, when the president of the United States sees more to admire in the Kremlin than in his own Constitution, the republic is in trouble.

The latest CIA review offers more than just vindication for the intelligence community. It reveals how close America came (and still comes) to having its institutions bent to suit one man’s political needs. That Ratcliffe chose to declassify the review and cherry-pick its flaws while burying its core conclusion deep inside speaks volumes about the rot within.