What Trump didn’t say at the debate

A shocking, if unsurprising, non-answer on Ukraine.

Donald Trump with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 (Photo by the White House)

Donald Trump can often be difficult to cover simply because he says so much, so quickly — a large portion of which is usually inflammatory or flat-out incorrect.

Tuesday night’s debate was no exception, as Trump insisted that immigrants were eating pets in Ohio (they aren’t) and that he won the 2020 election (he didn’t), among other claims lacking proof or evidence.

But the Trump moment that stuck out to me most on Tuesday wasn’t actually anything he said. It was something he didn’t.

The war between Russia and Ukraine — which began in February 2022 when the former invaded the later, unprovoked — came up a few times earlier in the debate, but it wasn’t until just after the one-hour mark that ABC News moderator David Muir invoked the conflict directly.

“I want to ask you a very simple question tonight,” Muir said, addressing the former president. “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?”

Trump said a lot in response, about Biden and Putin and Zelensky. “I want the war to stop,” he said. What he didn’t say was “yes.”

Muir tried again: “Just to clarify the question, do you believe it’s in the U.S.’ best interests for Ukraine to win this war? Yes or no?”

“I think it’s in the U.S.’ best interest to get this war finished and just get it done,” Trump said. “All right. Negotiate a deal. Because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”

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Stripped of the context of what we know about Trump’s past with Russia and Ukraine — relationships that have spawned a special counsel investigation and an impeachment, respectively — his response constituted a shocking non-answer from a past-and-possibly-future U.S. president.

After all, in the Russia-Ukraine war, one country is a U.S. adversary. The other is a U.S. ally. One country has been accused of raping civilians. The other has not. One country has been accused of abducting almost 20,000 children. The other has not. One country has been charged with torturing an American citizen. The other has not.

Trump himself has said, less than a month into the war, that Russia’s invasion was a “crime against humanity”; the U.S. government he wants to lead has made the same determination.

And yet, Trump couldn’t bring himself to pick a side in the ongoing conflict.

His position is a fairly fringe one. Many American politicians differ on whether the U.S. should be sending arms to Ukraine to aid its cause — but few (if any) have argued that Ukraine shouldn’t win at all. In a YouGov poll last year, 64% of Americans said their sympathies in the war lie with Ukraine, while only 3% said Russia. 11% said they weren’t sure, and 22% said neither, the camp Trump apparently falls in.

Even among his own 2020 voters, Trump is firmly in the minority on this question. 59% told YouGov that they sympathize with Ukraine over Russia; 79% of Biden 2020 voters and 60% of Independents said the same.

In fairness to Trump, live debates are hard. Maybe he meant to answer “yes” — the position held by almost two-thirds of voters — but got tripped up in the moment. After the debate ended, in the Spin Room, I asked his spokespeople, just to be sure.

Was the Trump campaign’s official position on the Russia-Ukraine war really indifference towards who won? “I don’t get ahead of the president on speaking on a policy decision like that,” David Bossie, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager, told me.

So the campaign has no preference at all? “The official position is what the president says,” he responded. I asked how he would describe what Trump had said. “The president wants the war to end,” Bossie replied, before repeating himself: “The president wants the war to end, to save lives and to make sure that the world doesn’t fall into even further chaos that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are responsible for. He pointed out that she went to the region to try to broker peace. And Vladimir Putin stuck it in her eye, invading three days later. That’s a no-respect thing to do.”

How would Trump go about ending the war, I asked. “Are you going to ask me the same question 10 times?” he responded. I tried pointing out that it wasn’t the same question at all — before I had asked if Trump wanted Ukraine to win, now I was asking how he would negotiate the peace he promises — but Bossie had moved on. “No, it is,” he said, before turning to speak with another reporter.

My conversations with other Trump aides went similarly. “The binary is a simple way to view” the war, Trump senior adviser Brian Hughes told me, suggesting that the ex-president didn’t side with either Kyiv or Moscow. “He’s on the side of stopping more people from joining the ranks of the dead and injured.”

Asked whether Trump had a plan for the peace talks he often touts as being able to end the war within 24 hours, former Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh sneered at the question: “You want to sit down at negotiating tables right here in the Spin Room? … I’m not going to open negotiations standing here talking to you.” (Just moments earlier, he had slammed Harris for not delving into enough policy specifics at the debate.)

Of course, the Spin Room wasn’t only populated by people on Trump’s payroll (although they did make up a disproportionate amount of his designated spinners). There were also several Republican members of Congress, many of whom have long records of commentary on Ukraine and other foreign conflicts — records I often found them willing to contort in service of Trump’s stance, by now an all-too-familiar Republican ritual.

“Donald Trump doesn’t talk like a politician,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told me. “He talks like a businessman and a negotiator, and he views his role in this conflict [as] bringing it to an end and negotiating an end. If he clearly expresses himself on one side or another, in his mind, he’s basically taking himself out of the equation as a viable negotiator.”

But, Rubio told me, he didn’t harbor hesitation about which side Trump sympathizes with privately. “Ultimately, I have no doubt what his policies [would be in a second term], because he wasn’t arming the Russians, he was arming the Ukrainians when he was president.”

Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. Trump, as president, quite famously held up Ukrainian military aid intended to confront Russia; even in Tuesday night’s debate, he continued his long pattern of speaking sympathetically towards Putin. If Trump wins re-election, the Russian leader will be “much happier than he is right now,” Trump said, something of an odd thing to boast about; later, when asked about world leaders’ opinion of him, Trump cited Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (a key Putin ally) as a character witness.

Rubio was unbothered. “At the end of the day, he’s not saying he’s going to arm the Russians,” the Florida senator pointed out, about the barest minimum statement of support for Kyiv imaginable.

I spent the longest with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL). He’s an interesting case because he’s certainly no war hawk — he’s been one of the loudest voices in Congress against sending aid to Ukraine. But it’s not as if his position on the war has been neutrality, even if he may not want to send U.S. dollars to the conflict. In 2022, he tweeted that he was “proud” to back a bipartisan resolution announcing America’s support for Ukraine. “Russia’s deadly attack on the sovereignty of Ukraine is a threat to freedom & the stability of the world,” he added at the time.

But, on Tuesday, Donalds saw no issue with Trump’s inability to say the same. “This is a major foreign policy conflict,” he told me. “It is, in my view, irresponsible to say, ‘I want X,’ because you’re gonna have to negotiate this out, let’s just be realistic. So having ambiguity on that part is actually wise.”

If you take that position to its logical extension, it can lead all sorts of places. The U.S. wasn’t exactly ambiguous in either of the World Wars on whether it wanted its allies to win. Not only that, there is another “major foreign policy conflict” going on right now: the war between Israel and Hamas. Obviously, Trump is willing to declare a preferred combatant there. Or so I thought.

Donalds, perhaps realizing the trap he had landed himself in, refused to say that Trump wants Israel to win its war when I pressed him on the point. “He wants the hostages back and he wants the conflict to come to an end,” Donalds said. “He wants Israel to be secure. He wants Ukraine to be secure. He wants the conflict to end. He wants people to stop dying. That’s what he wants.”

At this point, Donalds started to squirm. The other reporters surrounding Donalds and I started exchanging glances. It was hard to believe we were hearing: Trump has called himself the most pro-Israel president in history; was his surrogate really going to deny he wants Israel to defeat Hamas, all to defend his abandonment of another U.S. ally, Ukraine?

I tried one final time, asking directly if Trump sided with either Israel or Hamas. “Understand, you want peace,” Donalds said, evincing a nonchalance that has very much been missing from his public statements on the conflict. (“Kamala & the Democrats must make an important decision: Do you stand with our ally Israel & the innocent hostages taken on 10/7? OR... Do you stand with the Mullahs of Iran & their barbaric terrorist proxies?” he tweeted in July, apparently believing then that it was appropriate — and even “important” — to take a side in a foreign conflict.)

Donalds was done with me, so I scanned the Spin Room, eventually spotting one of the party’s most passionately pro-Ukraine voices, the hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham had reportedly started the night by calling Trump’s performance a “disaster” and saying his debate prep team should be fired. By the time I reached him, at a little after midnight, Graham sounded tired.

Does he think Trump should be more vocal about wanting one side or the other to win, I asked him. “Well, he said he wanted to end the war,” Graham responded wearily. “That’s what I heard.”

I followed up by asking if Graham himself sympathized with Russia or Ukraine. He ignored me, taking a question instead from an Israeli reporter.

The next morning, a statement from Graham appeared in my inbox. Along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), he was co-sponsoring a new bill, the Stand with Ukraine Act. “This legislation supports Ukraine in a variety of ways, sending a clear signal to brave Ukrainian fighters that we stand with them,” Graham said in the statement. “It also states plainly that we will not give in to Russian aggression.”

It seemed Graham was willing to say in a Senate press release what he wasn’t willing to say flanked by a Trump campaign handler 12 hours earlier.

Oddly enough, Graham opted not to post anything about the new legislation on his social media. He did, however, tweet a photo of himself with Trump shortly after the debate. “I am proud to support him and look forward to working with him when he returns to the White House,” Graham wrote in the caption.