As a veteran who paid a high physical price during her military service, US Senator Tammy Duckworth harbors undisguised disdain for Donald Trump. When Trump was still in the White House, she dismissed him at the 2020 Democratic party convention as the “coward-in-chief”, the ‘cowardly commander-in-chief’. Two years earlier, she had previously nicknamed him the villainous “Cadet Hielspoor” – after the medical condition that Trump presented as an adolescent to avoid conscription and deployment to Vietnam. Duckworth herself is an Iraq veteran, she was a helicopter pilot. She lost both legs when her helicopter was hit north of Baghdad in 2004.
Now that Trump, as a presidential candidate, openly questions NATO solidarity and his party in Congress is withholding new aid for Ukraine, she would like to emphasize that he is only expressing the opinion of a minority of Americans. “I want to assure our NATO allies and friends in the EU that support for Ukraine remains rock solid,” Duckworth said during an interview at the US ambassador’s residence in The Hague, where she was on a working visit at the end of this week.
Yet Washington has been arguing about aid to Kyiv for months now. Republicans demanded that further military aid be linked to a stricter approach to the asylum crisis at the southern border. Earlier this month, both parties in the Senate presented a far-reaching compromise proposal to this end, which mainly contained right-wing migration policy. When the Trumpists immediately rejected this, the Senate quickly and with broad support – including from almost half of the Republicans – passed an aid package for Ukraine.
However, Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, is currently blocking further consideration of this proposal. But ultimately, Duckworth predicts, “we will get it through the House.”
Ultimately, there was broad support in the Senate for aid to Ukraine, why did this take so long?
“It was hijacked by internal presidential campaign politics. And by the far right in the House, which said: we are not going to support this if there is not more border security. But the support [voor Oekraïne] has never changed. It was just about domestic border policy.”
Surveys show that support for Ukraine in the US is indeed waning, with Republican voters in particular becoming war-weary.
“I think mainly the hard core of 30 percent of Republican voters, but that has always been the case. They simply lean towards Russia anyway, because they are Trump supporters. And Trump, we know, is deep in Putin’s pocket. We know he does what Putin tells him to do. Lord knows what Putin knows about him.
“The former president is stirring up a very nationalist, protectionist and isolationalist sentiment among a certain section. But this is only about 28 to 30 percent of the population. Unfortunately, because of our political system of primaries, which you must first win to get into Congress, these are the voters who show up. That is what is driving the Republican agenda right now.”
Outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD), who this week openly supported President Joe Biden as the next NATO chief, said last week that Europeans “must stop whining, whining and whining about Trump” and that, regardless of who is in The White House needs to do more on defense.
Has Trump, in his own way, been more effective in shaking up Europe than your own government?
“No, I do not think so. The fact that President Biden has just endorsed your Prime Minister is a big one boost for his candidacy. But I don’t think it’s a Trump thing. I think it is the outcome of two years of war in Ukraine, which shows how existential the threat is and how important the NATO alliance is.
“I’m not going to predict when the war in Ukraine will end, but if it ends with Russia swallowing up part of Ukraine, then other European countries and NATO should really start to worry. You know that Russia will not stop its expansionism.”
Four years ago, Duckworth, who has an American father and a Thai mother, was one of the female party members of color who vetted Biden as a possible vice presidential candidate. The 81-year-old president wants to run for re-election in November.
Your party has a lot of young talent. Why then does she continue to cling to Biden, who would be 85 when he leaves the White House after a new term?
“Because we don’t judge people by their age. The Democratic Party judges people on their abilities and their ability to bounce back,” she says, before listing a long list of Biden’s legislative successes as well as the fruits of his economic policies (job growth, lower inflation).
Yet voters seem to give him little credit for it. And even though Biden is only three years older than Trump, they seem to think the president is too old.
“Voters are not going to choose between Joe Biden and Donald Trump based on their age. They will choose based on the fact that Trump has pushed for the erosion of abortion rights. I really think abortion is going to be one of the most important topics. We’re going to talk about that a lot. And about the economy. It is still a long way until the elections. We will still have the opportunity to spread that message.”