Letter From the Editors
The bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear on July 13 kept journalists all over the planet busy for days, reporting, analyzing and speculating. And the fruits of their labors may keep media researchers busy for much longer. Russian press coverage of the event offers a startling contrast to what The New York Times, The Guardian and the like have to offer. Western reportage has focused on the psychological profile of the shooter, Thomas Crooks, and the US Secret Service’s failure to prevent his actions. Russian journalists took note of these factors, of course, but tried hard to find hidden motives behind them.
For example, Yevgeny Shestakov and Nikolai Dolgopolov write: “It is obvious even to a person unversed in US foreign policy realities that there are at least two forces that may stand to lose a great deal if Trump gets into the White House. However, these two forces are the very ones that have never been mentioned in the ongoing investigation. The first is the European Union, where Trump has been actively demonized over the past year.” Can you guess the second? Here’s a hint: It’s a country that got invaded in 2022, and Trump has promised to stop the war there in 24 hours if he gets elected.
Why exactly the government in Kiev would want to kill Trump is open to question, but one thing that Russian commentators seem to agree on is that the threat on his life has consolidated the right wing in Washington. The same cannot be said of the European Parliament, in which conservative politicians largely lost out on leadership positions despite recent electoral gains in their respective countries. Maksim Chikin poses the provocative theory that prominent leaders like Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orban failed to forge a coalition not despite their charisma, but because of it. He writes that all of them are guided by personal ambition: “As a rule, parties of this kind are either founded by charismatic individuals, or such people assume leadership positions as a result of harsh conflicts with party members.” Chikin quotes an Italian politician’s explanation of why Le Pen and Meloni aren’t part of the same faction: “There cannot be two queens in one hive.”
Another factor, of course, is that the “far right” encompasses a variety of convictions, from nationalism to economic protectionism. The one factor that unites them, according to Chikin, is anti-immigration policy.
Finland seems to be part of this trend. NG reports the passage of a law in the Finnish parliament called the “Act on Temporary Measures to Combat Instrumentalized Migration.” Part of the backstory is that Helsinki had accused Moscow of “weaponizing migration” – i.e., encouraging hundreds of refugees from Syria, Somalia and other countries to cross the border from Russia. In response, the Finnish government closed that border. The new law reopens the border but requires refugees arriving from Russia to be housed in special centers there while their asylum applications are reviewed. This procedure empowers border guards to deny entry to asylum seekers right at the border and deport them to Russia with no possibility of appeal.
Finnish parliamentary deputy Li Andersson, who opposed the law, says there is no reason asylum seekers would threaten Finland’s sovereignty. She cautioned that “national security has been used throughout history whenever authoritarian states limit people’s basic rights.”
Just across the bay in St. Petersburg, Aleksei Makarkin discerns that rationale in the Kremlin’s support of Governor Aleksandr Beglov: “St. Petersburg is both a military-industrial city and the second capital of the country, and the fact that the president has met with its governor three times in the past three months only emphasizes his status as the sovereign’s man.”
While the shot from Crooks’s rifle may have woken up American conservative voters to stand by their man Trump, a Meduza source sees the opposite strategy at work in Beglov’s quiet campaign: “Don’t wake up the voter.”