Russia Faces An Uphill Battle Winning Back Hearts & Minds Among MAGA

Average members of the movement have come to believe that Putin and those around him support everything that they oppose such as Leftism, Islamism, Iran, and the “MAGA dissidents”.

Laura Loomer’s recent trip to Kiev and interview with Zelensky, which represented a complete reversal of her prior position as a hardcore critic of him and his country, is being widely discussed among the MAGA movement that Trump leads. After all, she’s one of his top advisors, with such powerful influence over him that she reportedly convinced him to fire six National Security Council staffers last year. It’s therefore reasonable to expect that she could convince him to further harden his position towards Russia.

That might already be in progress after he shared her interview with Zelensky ahead of the latter’s trip to DC for Lindsey Graham’s funeral and declared that “[MAGA will] support what I support” in response to being asked about his movement’s growing Ukrainophilia. For background, he recently “escalated to de-escalate” against Russia through a new “war of attrition” that’s now targeting civilians, and he can always impose crippling punitive tariffs against its top oil clients and order Ukraine to ramp up drone strikes.

The question is therefore whether Trump will escalate any further, and if so, exactly how far he’ll go. These calculations represent a complete reversal of his prior position as a hardcore critic of the Ukrainian Conflict, which parallels Loomer’s own reversal, both of which coincide with MAGA’s growing Ukrainophilia. This last-mentioned trend arguably facilitated the aforesaid two and deserves some elaboration. In general, most MAGA don’t want another forever war, but they’re souring on Russia.

Putin used to be seen as global icon of conservatism, but everything that Trump has achieved in this respect for the US since returning to office made Putin less appealing in their eyes. This in turn made them relatively more susceptible to negative reports about him, particularly the ones alleging that he’s giving Trump the runaround on a Ukrainian peace deal as well as authorized emergency military-technical exports to Iran during the 12-Day and Third Gulf Wars. That left major impressions on MAGA.

As the first phase of the Third Gulf War was raging, Loomer’s feud with Tucker Carlson was heating up, and she began drawing attention to how he interviewed Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin during his trip to Moscow in 2024. Dugin, who isn’t and never was Putin’s advisor despite viral claims to the contrary, has openly supported Tucker and Loomer’s other rival, Candace Owens, among other so-called “MAGA dissidents”. Loomer thus concocted the conspiracy theory that Dugin is their puppeteer.

Dugin is an extraordinarily harsh critic of Trump, which further turned average MAGA members against Russia upon learning about this from Loomer, and they also don’t like efforts to build what has been called the “red-green alliance” between their movement’s Leftist and Islamist enemies. Throw in publicly funded Russian media’s positive occasional reporting on Carlson and Owens, both of whom Trump strongly disowned in early April, and it’s easy to see why MAGA now sees Russia as an enemy too.

Russia will therefore face an uphill battle to win back hearts and minds among MAGA, if it’s even possible anymore, after an inflection point appears to have been passed following Loomer’s trip to Kiev and interview with Zelensky. MAGA as a whole now perceives Putin negatively, believing that he and those around him support everything that they oppose such as Leftism, Islamism, Iran, and the “MAGA dissidents”, which has led to growing resentment against Russia that’s fueling their new Ukrainophilia.