I mean Trump becoming president was absolutely a win for Putin. Both of them openly said so at the time, and continue to do so to this day.
Oh, absolutely no argument here -- but the same can
and should be said of GWB, lest we forget the "bromance" with his Russian counterpart that occupied so much media time during his administration. It's not so much a "Trump" thing as it is a "conservative" thing. The bigger distinction there was that neocons cozy up to geopolitical rivals whilst pretending otherwise, and paleocons (as much as Trump was one) are simply content letting geopolitical rivals do whatever so long as US interest isn't directly threatened.
What's of material consequence, is how the issue is
framed by the mass media, and the impact that framing has on public perception and policy expectation. Or more specifically in this case, the manufacture of consent for chilled relations with Russia...and it behooves me to mention this is
also not just a "Trump" thing, this was well ongoing during Obama's administration as well. It just happened to
peak during Trump's administration, thanks exclusively to the Russiagate nonsense.
And now, we're stuck in a media hellscape in which public perception and policy expectation
thanks to the past five years' media hostility to Russia, is to respond to Russian aggression in kind, when the US has no basis or capacity to do so. Sabre-rattling and limp-dick sanctions which neither the European Union nor NATO will genuinely support, thanks to aforementioned dependency on Russian fossil fuels, are all that's going to happen. Whether that satiates the vicarious bloodlust of froth-mouthed boomers whose minds perpetually exist in the '80s, is yet to be seen.