Undermining Trump in Ukraine – Washington Examiner

Many Democrats, along with their activist and media allies, and some Republicans too, would like to stop Trump. But the president has a broad constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs. That, of course, hasn’t kept the opposition from trying.

A recent podcast gave the public a peek into the opposition’s thinking. The podcast is Talking Feds, hosted by Harry Litman, a law professor and senior Justice Department official during the Clinton years. In an episode about Ukraine, Michael McFaul, the Stanford University professor who was U.S. ambassador to Russia for a couple of years during the Obama administration and is a staunch supporter of the Ukrainian war effort, argued that Trump’s plan to end the war, whatever it is, does not represent the will of U.S. voters.

“I just want to emphasize that the American people, they voted for the price of eggs, folks, they didn’t say we want to abdicate to be the leader of the free world,” McFaul said. “They didn’t say we want to get in bed with Putin. They didn’t say we wanted to pull out of NATO.”

Just for the record, you might remember that during the campaign, candidate Trump often discussed international affairs, including ending the war in Ukraine. He also talked about the U.S. relationship with NATO, remarks that sometimes caused controversy, and he talked about Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Now, McFaul said Trump is “overreaching” on a wide range of issues and will pay a political price at home. McFaul is helping the opposition prepare for that. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Democrats in the Congress over the last couple of weeks, and I think they have not got their act together yet,” he said. “But just last night, with a group out here in California — and I won’t name names, but we have some prominent people who have been in leadership positions from time to time out here — their feeling is we just got to get the guy [Trump] down to below 45. And once he’s below 45, then all of our feckless Republican friends who are just scared to death of doing anything might start pushing back.”

By getting Trump below 45, McFaul was referring to the president’s job approval rating, which stands at 49.3% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Some have argued that 49.3% is not particularly high for a president at this point in his term, which would be true if Trump were in his first term. Since Trump is in his second but nonconsecutive term, it’s hard to compare, but according to Gallup, former President Barack Obama’s approval rating was 49% at this point in his second term. So Trump’s 49% is certainly not unprecedented.

In any event, McFaul and the Democrats he is working with believe that if they can push Trump’s job approval rating below 45%, some Republicans will stop supporting Trump’s Ukraine policy. GOP lawmakers, according to this scenario, will be particularly nervous supporting Trump as the 2026 midterm elections approach. And that, apparently, is what McFaul told the Ukrainian officials he met last week at the Munich Security Conference — be patient until Trump can be stopped.

“I kept saying to my European friends and my Ukrainian friends last week, you know, hang in there,” McFaul said. “We just got to get to the midterms, and then things will change. I’m not confident predicting that, but I’m trying to achieve that.” McFaul did not say specifically who those Ukrainian friends were, but at another point in the podcast, he noted that while in Munich, he talked to “very senior Zelensky officials who were in the meeting with Vice President Vance.” 

Now, an influential American traveling abroad speaking with high-ranking foreign officials in an effort to undercut an American president’s positions is not particularly admirable. But McFaul appears to have concluded that he and his colleagues speak for more American voters than does Trump, who, after all, was elected on the price of eggs.

Trump’s job now is clear, if not simple — to come up with the best possible agreement to end the war. Make it stick. Then move on. None of that will be enough to satisfy his domestic political adversaries, who, if Democrats win in 2026, will try to undo Trump’s work and, if they win the House, might well try (yet again) to remove him from office. Trump has seen all that before. His task in the area of international affairs is to stay focused on trying to restore some of the order in the world that collapsed in the years he was out of office.