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“If they can do this to me, they can do this to anybody,” Trump said Friday, speaking from his namesake tower in New York.
Thousands of miles away, Russian President Vladimir Putin was probably “rubbing his hands with glee,” said Fiona Hill, a former senior White House national security adviser to three U.S. presidents, including Trump.
Hill and other analysts say Trump’s attacks could be useful for Putin and other autocrats as they seek to boost their standing among their own citizens, potentially influencing the upcoming U.S. presidential election in which Trump is the presumptive candidate. of the Republicans, and to undermine the global position of the United States influence.
Some autocratic countries reacted swiftly in support of Trump.
Moscow agreed with Trump’s assessment of Thursday’s sentence, calling it the “elimination of political rivals by all possible legal or illegal means,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
In September, Putin said the prosecution of Trump was a political vendetta that “shows the rottenness of the American political system.”
Putin is particularly likely to see the latest turmoil as an opportunity, analysts say. He has long sought to widen divisions in Western societies in an attempt to push a Russian worldview.
“What mischief does he have to do when there are people within the American system itself who are denigrating it and tearing it down?” Hill said of Putin.
Political chaos can benefit autocratic leaders by distracting Washington from key issues, including the war in Ukraine. Russia’s goal is to move voices from “the fringes of political debate to the mainstream,” said David Salvo, managing director of the Alliance for Democracy at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, DC.
The Kremlin does this in part by pushing Russian viewpoints under the guise of news and social media posts that appear to originate in the West.
Salvo noted that the disagreements in Congress that delayed the aid package for Ukraine followed a Russian social media campaign targeting Americans.
This led to Russian supremacy on the battlefield.
Attacks on the US justice system by Trump and his allies are “perfect fodder” for another “massive propaganda and influence operation,” Hill told The Associated Press, suggesting Russia may be targeting voters in battleground states before the November election.
For generations, US presidential administrations have portrayed America as a bastion of democracy, free speech and human rights and encouraged other countries to adopt these ideals.
But Trump suggested the court system was being used to prosecute him — something that happens in some autocratic countries.
Leaders, including Putin, “must love” that Trump is criticizing “key institutions of democracy” in the way autocratic states have done for years, as it legitimizes them in the eyes of their own people, said Graham Robertson, a professor of political in Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Trump sees himself as a “strong ruler” and looks to Putin for inspiration, Hill said.
Crowds erupt outside court after Trump’s sentencing
His attacks encourage every nation — from the soft-spoken to the openly hostile — to “have their moment to bring down the colossus,” Hill said.
The message to Chinese and Russian citizens watching the drama in the US is that they are better off at home.
The message to countries that Russia and China are courting as they try to expand their influence in Africa, Asia and Latin America is that Moscow and Beijing can offer more reliable partnerships.
The threat from the “new axis of authoritarians,” including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, is “frightening” as those countries work more closely together with overlapping interests, said Matthew Kroenig, a former defense official and vice president of the Atlantic advice Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
Moscow in particular, Kroenig said, is likely to try to use the political turmoil in the US to split the NATO security alliance.
It could try to turn the public in NATO countries against the US by encouraging them to question whether they have “shared values” with the Americans, he said.
If successful, it could lead to a fundamental reshaping of the global security architecture—a goal of Russia and China—since the end of the Cold War.
Meanwhile, some Western governments are caught in a delicate dance between reluctance to reject Trump as a potential next US president and the need to respect the US judicial system.
Others, such as EU member Hungary, are openly courting him.
“For Putin, this has to be perfect because it creates a mess that he can try to take advantage of,” Hill said.
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