No, there’s no equating Trump and Navalny

regime and the Democrats is to ensure their leading political opponent dies in prison. There’s no real difference between the two cases.”

Ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed, on X : Navalny’s death “is a brutal reminder that jailing your political opponents is inhumane and a violation of every principle of a free society. Watch the Biden Administration speak out against Putin and his jailing of his leading political opponent while Democrats in four different jurisdictions try to turn President Trump into an American Navalny. The hypocrisy and corruption of the left is astonishing.”

D’Souza and Gingrich were hardly alone in indulging this grotesque exercise in Soviet-style propaganda. On Monday, Trump himself invoked the comparison. His first mention of Navalny’s name wasn’t to condemn his death or Putin’s role in it, but to cast himself as an American Navalny. “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country,” he declared before spewing the usual grievances.

Condemning such false moral equivalence was once central to American conservatism. Ronald Reagan’s United Nations Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick and National Review founder William F. Buckley led those denouncing the anti-Americanism inherent in equating undemocratic and democratic regimes. When someone told Buckley that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were the same because they both spend a lot on the military, he replied, “That’s like saying that the man who pushed old ladies out of the way of an incoming bus is like the man who pushes old ladies into the way of an incoming bus. Both push old ladies around.”

Trump is not an innocent anti-corruption crusader brutalized and murdered for championing democracy and the rule of law. Nor does Moscow’s subway system — built with slave labor— pose some grand indictment of America, as Carlson insinuated.

There are ample plausible criticisms of the legal cases against Trump, but even if you agree with all of them (I don’t), the notion that Joe Biden is the moral equivalent of Vladimir Putin is a slander, not merely of Biden but of America itself. Indeed, one reason we know it’s not true: Publicly criticizing Putin’s treatment of Navalny can land you in a Russian cell. Criticizing Biden’s (alleged) treatment of Trump can land you in a Fox News studio.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch.