The escalating tension between the Trump administration and Ukraine in recent weeks has been accompanied by an alarming surge of extreme anti-Ukraine rhetoric in pro-Trump quarters. Some of this rhetoric has even implied that Ukraine is America’s enemy. On Monday, Trump administration official Elon Musk called Arizona’s Democratic senator Mark Kelly a “traitor” for travelling to Ukraine in support of that country’s defensive war effort.

Hostility to Ukraine is becoming a party line on the MAGA Right. The issue isn’t just the cost to American taxpayers. The US$128 billion that the US has given Ukraine over the past three years amounts to less than US$120 per year per American. And as a recent article on the Council of Foreign Relations website noted:

A large share of the money in the aid bills has been spent in the United States, paying for American factories and workers to produce the various weapons that are either shipped to Ukraine or that replenish the U.S. weapons stocks the Pentagon has drawn on during the war. One analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found that Ukraine aid is funding defense manufacturing in more than seventy U.S. cities.

Nor is antipathy to Ukraine simply about bringing an end to the bloodletting, notwithstanding the Right’s professed disdain for “warmongers” eager to “fight to the last Ukrainian” and Trump’s own claim that he wants to “stop the death.” When Trump suspended air-defence supplies and intelligence-sharing to Ukraine earlier this month in an attempt to pressure the country into “settling,” Russia began bombing Ukrainian cities with renewed vigour. Asked during a press conference on 7 March if Vladimir Putin was “taking advantage of the US pause right now on intelligence and military aid,” Trump was phlegmatic about the loss of life: “I actually think [Putin’s] doing what anybody else would do. I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them. And I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”

The party line is now strong enough that even some “heterodox” pundits and publications with large right-wing audiences have pivoted away from their initial support for Ukraine. In the first two years of the conflict, coverage at the Free Press was firmly pro-Ukraine. But since the reelection of Donald Trump last November, the publication’s position has become more sympathetic to “right-wing peaceniks” (once described by Free Press contributor Eli Lake as “Code Pink Republicans”) and correspondingly unsympathetic to Ukraine’s cause. Some of this commentary has been shoddy and even dishonest.