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Trump’s Putin talk keeps boomeranging as Ukraine war deepens
Trump’s refusal to cleanly break with Vladimir Putin kept drawing condemnation on March 6, as the invasion of Ukraine entered another brutal day and Republicans faced fresh pressure over how much of the party was still willing to excuse Trump’s Russia fixation. The damage was not that Trump had discovered some new policy position; it was that his past praise for Putin and his habit of framing authoritarian aggression as a negotiation tactic were now sitting in the middle of an actual European war. That left his allies stuck explaining, again, why the party’s loudest voice sounded less like a former commander in chief and more like a guy auditioning for Kremlin-adjacent sympathy points.