Former President Donald Trump addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd on Saturday evening. He covered a lot of topics, from border security, to China, to Supreme Court-packing, to critical race theory, to criticizing Biden. It definitely riled up the crowd. It was just missing one thing: Trump demanding that Russian President Vladimir Putin exit Ukraine. It was a missed opportunity where he could have channeled Ronald Reagan. It could have been Trump’s ‘Tear down this wall’ moment.
It wasn’t as if Trump did not address the crisis in Ukraine. He did. He said it was wrong and expressed sympathy to the Ukrainians suffering as a result of the invasion. He also claimed that Putin would never have invaded Ukraine if he were still president. It is a bold claim, and it might even be true. In 2008, while George W. Bush was president, Putin invaded Ukraine. In 2014, when Barack Obama was president, Putin invaded Ukraine and subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula.
