A nation must think before it acts.
February 18, 2020
Post by Cristina Goerdt
As reported in FIE 2020’s second analysis, Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik News typically discuss President Donald Trump the candidate and Trump the foreign policy decision-maker in starkly different terms: the former positively and the latter negatively. However, following Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria in October of last year, Russian media went in a different direction, publishing negative content painting Trump as both an ineffective head of state and candidate for reelection.
On the Syrian issue, RT and Sputnik construct unfavorable narratives riddled with declarations of hypocrisy and malintent by Trump, consistently striving to depict the president as a chaotic leader pushing his own interests abroad and America an unreliable ally in the Middle East. Whatever the reason, negative mentions of Trump and his Syria policy arise in wide-ranging contexts, including the following talking points and relevant examples: