Tucker Carlson, another orthodox Trumpist and the dominant conservative pundit of the moment, is unreservedly pro-Putin. “Why do Democrats want you to hate Putin?” he asked Tuesday. “Has Putin shipped every middle class job in your town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked your business? Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Does he eat dogs?”

The answers to these faux-naive questions are easy enough: Democrats are not alone in hating Putin, who is a likely war criminal who has repeatedly broken international law, poisoned dissidents, and killed journalists, to pick just a few offenses. Carlson is smart enough to know all of that, so maybe he’s playing dumb, or maybe he doesn’t find those things objectionable.

A second group of Republicans trying to figure out how to respond to Putin’s invasion is what we might call the anti–anti-Trump-foreign-policy faction: They want to capitalize on some of the energy and ideas of Trumpism, but their shame is too strong or their stomachs too weak to debase themselves like Pompeo and Carlson. An anti–anti-Trump view of the crisis brings in Trumpian culture-war themes and a “gotta hand it to them” attitude about authoritarians like Putin.

A prominent exponent of this school is Ben Shapiro, a pundit with a foot in the old conservative movement who once opposed Trump but gradually found accommodation with him. “Russia and China are focused on expanding their spheres of influence via aggressive action,” Shapiro tweeted today. “The West is focused on expanding its national debt and exploding the gender binary. Whatever advantages we have on an objective level are wildly undermined by our narcissistic idiocy.” The Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J. D. Vance has taken the view that the Ukraine crisis is simply not of interest or relevance to the U.S. and that Americans should focus on immigration, an odd (and politically perilous) false binary.