‘Putin’s Parrot’: How the ‘Talking Points’ Trope Fuels War
The discourse over Ukraine shows just how pervasive, and corrosive, this rhetorical reflex has become.
“Trump Tells Americans What Putin Wants Them to Hear.” This was the headline of a recent article from Bloomberg, attributed not to any particular writer but to “Bloomberg News” as a whole. This finding, Bloomberg explained, resulted from a scan by a Large Language Model of “more than 300 of [Donald] Trump's public comments between August 2024 and mid-March as well as more than 3,000 social media posts.” The results, reviewed by humans, showed “a correlation between Trump administration contacts with [Vladimir] Putin and subsequent comments that echoed the Russian leader's own positions” on various topics. To help readers along, Bloomberg included a quote from Fiona Hill, Trump’s former Russia adviser. “Trump parrots Putin,” Hill told Bloomberg, adding that Putin’s efforts amount to a “masterclass” in “manipulation.”
Trump has said all manner of appalling things about Ukraine. He has called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky an “unelected dictator” and falsely suggested that Kyiv started the war. But consider, for a moment, the gravity of Bloomberg’s language. A leading US news outlet is accusing a sitting US president of “echoing Putin’s talking points” and advancing Russian interests instead of American ones. It’s an immense accusation, one that in an earlier era wouldn’t have been made by a major news organization without painstaking reporting and analysis. Instead, building on a record of similar articles published during Trump’s first term, news outlets are deploying it with increasing abandon.
The question is what such charges are supposed to accomplish. Those who from 2016 through 2020 hoped to bring about the political ruin, or even incarceration, of Trump over alleged collusion with Russia found themselves with little to show for it, either in hard evidence or in legal results. Whatever the aim of the “Putin’s parrot” accusation may be, however, the likely consequences are clear: to make it harder and harder for Trump and his allies to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine. Negotiation is, after all, a delicate process. Mediators must understand the views and beliefs of both sides in order to push them toward a deal, identifying difficult concessions that might seem biased against one party or the other. If a mediator is pilloried as an agent of evil forces for every effort at compromise, then the legitimacy of the whole enterprise is thrown into question. In the Putin’s-talking-points framework, anyone who bothers to understand the perspective of an official US enemy is at best a fool and at worst a traitor. The discourse over Ukraine shows just how pervasive, and corrosive, this rhetorical reflex has become.
Accusing earnest diplomats of sympathy for the enemy is nothing new, of course. Nicias of Athens was tarred as a tool of Sparta for trying to end the Peloponnesian War, and US founding father John Jay was accused of sympathy to the crown for arriving at a treaty with England. But you might hope that people have gotten a little wiser in the intervening years. Instead, the opposite may be true. During the talks that led to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, for example, then-Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) slammed President Obama for allegedly voicing “talking points that come straight out of Tehran.” In 2017, after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) delayed a vote to admit Montenegro to NATO, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accused Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.” And just last year, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) railed against Democrats for expressing what he saw as insufficient concern over Chinese nationals entering the US illegally, saying that “really their talking points are coming right out of the CCP,” or the Chinese Communist Party.
The fights over US policy toward Ukraine, however, make those earlier insults look almost restrained. Just in the past several months, the phrase “Putin’s talking points,” or a close variant, has been employed by writers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and just about every other major media outlet. What most of the articles have in common is a dim view of diplomacy with Moscow and a willingness to frame almost any effort at negotiation as evidence of treachery. In its lengthy indictment of Trump for alleged adherence to Putin talking points, Bloomberg highlighted a comment from February in which Trump 1) criticized Zelensky over Kyiv’s resistance to talks with Moscow and 2) argued that you “can’t bring a war to an end if you don’t talk to both sides.” This was hardly wild. When Trump came to office, Ukraine showed little interest in direct peace negotiations, and Trump needed to change that if he wanted to get a deal. But, for Bloomberg, the comment seemed to parrot an assertion from Putin that “the Ukrainian side has forbidden itself to negotiate.”
Elsewhere, Bloomberg went further, insinuating that Trump, having spoken to Putin one day before, came out re-programmed to Moscow’s liking the next.