We’re all waiting to see what comes of President Donald Trump’s high-stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin on Friday.
Will Trump go with the harder line on the Russian president that he debuted last month? Or will he revert to his kid gloves treatment of Putin that reigned for many years before that? And what are the actual prospects for some kind of ceasefire or even a peace deal?
These are the major unknowns.
But going into the meeting, a couple things are clear: Americans are more hawkish on the war in Ukraine than they’ve been in a long time, and Trump has his work cut out for him.
Trump’s recent moves toward criticizing Putin appear to have helped awaken some of the inner hawkishness that once dominated the conservative movement’s foreign policy.
A Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll released Friday showed the percentage of Republicans who favor sending Ukraine additional arms and military supplies rising from 30% in March to 51% today. The percentage of Republicans who favor increased sanctions on Russia has also jumped, from 63% in March to 74% today.
A new Pew Research Center poll released Thursday showed just 30% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the United States is doing “too much” to support Ukraine.
That number is down sharply from the 47% who said the same in February, and it’s the lowest it has been since the first year of the war, in 2022.
Similarly, the numbers among all Americans show an increasing appetite for standing by Ukraine.
Just 18% of Americans said the US was doing “too much,” while a majority said it was doing “about the right amount” or “not enough.” Both of those numbers lean more in Ukraine’s favor than at any point since 2022.
A Fox News poll last month echoed those findings.
It showed 38% of voters said the US “should be doing more” to help Ukraine. That’s the highest that number has ever been, in polling dating back to December 2022. (Polls earlier in 2022 asked a different version of the question.)
While Americans in October said by double digits that the US should be doing less, in July they said by double digits that we should be doing more.
And again, there was a major shift among Republicans.
While majorities said in May 2024 and October 2024 that the United States “should be doing less” for Ukraine, that number plummeted to 32% in July.
Both polls also show how this could complicate matters for Trump. His many years of treating Putin gently have created a clear sense that he’s not necessarily up to the task of playing hardball with him, and now Americans seem to want a harder line.
The Pew poll, for instance, showed about half of Americans who offered an opinion said Trump was too favorable toward Russia.
That’s down from March – perhaps reflecting Trump’s tougher comments on Putin – but it’s still a huge number of Americans who think he’s too cozy with an American adversary.
And perhaps most striking ahead of Friday’s meeting is a finding from the Fox poll.
It asked whether people thought Trump or Putin had the “upper hand in the situation in Ukraine.” Voters said that was Putin, 58-35%. Even 37% of Republicans said Putin had the upper hand.
In context, that might not seem too surprising. Putin, unlike Trump, controls one of the two militaries in the conflict, so obviously he has lots of control over what happens.
But it’s very rare to see that many Republicans concede that Trump is effectively being outmaneuvered. A major ethos of the MAGA movement is that Trump always has some secret, genius plan in the works – three-dimensional chess! – that his critics just don’t understand. But lots of Republicans don’t seem to see it here.
Overall, the war in Ukraine is one of Trump’s worst issues right now in terms of polling. Friday could be a chance to start righting the ship, or it could reinforce why Americans have been so skeptical of his confusing handling of Putin.
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