Editorial: Donald ​Trump and his stooge Tucker Carlson bolster Russian aggression

A Donald Trump stooge called Tucker Carlson has carried out a shameful interview with Vladimir Putin.

America has been a great ally of the UK for most of the last 200 years, despite a rocky relationship in the decades immediately after it broke free from Britain. The United States soon after independence became a superpower and by the 1900s was the richest nation in history. It has always had an isolationist strain, which is hardly surprising given that it is a self-sufficient continent.

But America has been the global leader that the world needed, above all in two world wars, when America First isolationists were ultimately ignored by US leaders who knew that the country needed to take a stand for democracy and western values.

Donald Trump has not so much been in that isolationist tradition as a man who has fluctuated between one foreign policy and another, above all guided by his vanity. If a dictator likes him then they are a friend, it a trusted ally disagrees with him then they are shunned. Mr Carlson is a TV anchor who has pandered to this sort of incoherence and childishness.

Now he has given succour to the tyrant who invaded Ukraine, plunging Europe into the worst war since 1945. Meanwhile he has queried why America should back Israel, the only nation in the Middle East that shares western values. His hero Mr Trump is the sort of man who wants to do business with America’s non friends in Saudi Arabia and China.

Now the former president, who is likely to re-enter the White House within 12 months given Joe Biden’s cognitive problems, has further disgraced himself by inviting Russian aggression against Nato nations who do not pay enough for defence. Such countries deserved to be named for not pulling their weight, just as Ireland does. But for Mr Trump to undermine the vital Nato alliance in this way shows how ill-suited he is to leading the free world.