Former President Donald Trump broke his long silence Monday on the death of Alexey Navalny—not to offer sympathy to the late political prisoner or to condemn Vladimir Putin, of course, but to seemingly compare his own legal situation to the fate of the Russian opposition leader. “The sudden death of [Navalny] has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” the GOP frontrunner wrote on his social media site. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path of destruction.”
“WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” Trump added.
It was characteristic fare from Trump, who has cast himself as something of a MAGA martyr as he faces 91 felony charges in four separate indictments, along with damages in fraud and defamation cases that now add up to nearly half a billion dollars. But his fantasies of political persecution are particularly crass coming days after the death of Navalny in a remote arctic prison, where he’d been serving a lengthy sentence on actual politically-motivated charges stemming from his role as Putin’s leading critic.
Both the Biden campaign and Nikki Haley, who is continuing her longshot primary bid against Trump, pounced on the comments. But some allies of the former president, who just a week ago said he would “encourage” Russia to attack NATO countries, had already tried to compare his legal predicament to the persecution of Navalny, who was nearly poisoned to death in 2020. “Democrats are actively doing [Joe Biden’s] bidding as they also try to imprison his chief political opponent…remove him from the ballot, and ensure he dies in prison,” former Republican representative Lee Zeldin wrote Friday after reports of Navalny’s death.
Navalny, 47, was an anti-corruption crusader and strident critic of Putin, the strongman Trump repeatedly praised as president and once again as a candidate. Jailed since 2021, he was moved last year to a remote penal colony in Siberia. His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who has not yet been able to recover her husband’s body from Kremlin authorities, gave an emotional address to the Munich Security Conference just hours after hearing of his death Friday and on Monday vowed to carry on his fight. “By killing Alexey, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” Navalnaya said. “But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up. I will continue the work of Alexey Navalny.”
