Donald Trump has long shown admiration and respect for Vladimir Putin, saying that the authoritarian Russian president is “doing a great job” in “rebuilding Russia,” and “I think I’d get along very well with Vladimir Putin.” After Putin called Trump a “talented person” last year, he returned the favor: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

So it came as no surprise when he praised Putin during NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum” on Wednesday night. “The man has very strong control over a country,” Trump told Matt Lauer. “It’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”

Trump also said Putin had an “82 percent approval rating.” (This was roughly true when he started using this line last year, but slightly less true lately.) Americans, though, feel less affection for the Russian strongman. A Bloomberg poll conducted last month found that 69 percent of respondents were bothered by Trump’s praise of Putin, the seventh-highest concern about the Republican nominee.



Why, then, does Trump continue to show affection for Putin? Some journalists have tried to explain it in crass economic terms, by pointing to evidence that Trump has borrowed money from Russian oligarchs and that former campaign manager Paul Manafort was handsomely compensated by Putin allies in the Ukraine. This explanation is certainly suggestive, but even if Trump and his cohort didn’t receive one red ruble from Russia, they would still be attracted to Putin.



Trump draws his ideological energies from the alt-right and the older paleoconservative movement, both of which find plenty to admire in the Russian leader. Pat Buchanan, whose presidential campaigns prefigured Trump’s, perfectly expressed nationalist Americans’ affinity for Putin in a 2013 column, “Is Putin One of Us?”