How Donald Trump has become the 'Lord Haw Haw' of anti-Ukraine propaganda
In August 1939, as war with Nazi Germany loomed, a man called William Joyce chose to leave Britain for Berlin. “England was going to war. I felt that if... I could not fight for her, I must give her up forever,” he later wrote.
Joyce’s name is long forgotten, but he is still remembered as the infamous “Lord Haw-Haw”, the voice of the Nazis on radio broadcasts. One of Joyce’s reported remarks was that “the people of England will curse themselves for having preferred ruin from Churchill to peace from Hitler”. The man who invaded most of Europe was actually a man of peace, he asked his many listeners to believe, while Winston Churchill should be blamed for ‘choosing’ war.
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Hide AdSimilar siren calls can be heard today about the conflict in Ukraine, from the political left and right. Despite Ukraine’s right to defend itself, following an unprovoked invasion by a dictator intent on conquest, there are those who call for peace at any price. Putin’s aggression, it seems, is to be rewarded with huge swathes of Ukrainian territory, with any people still living there surrendered to his tyranny.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose stalwart leadership during his country’s greatest crisis has led to comparisons to Churchill, has demonstrated considerable courage in opposing Putin. Offered a chance to flee at the outbreak of war, with Russian soldiers coming to kill him, Zelensky chose to stay.
Trump talks down Ukraine
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Donald Trump has been a vocal advocate for ‘peace’. Asked twice whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war, he refused to answer, saying instead: "I want the war to stop. I want to save lives.”
More recently he has claimed the chance to make a peace deal was all but gone. “Any deal, the worst deal, would’ve been better than what we have now,” Trump said. “If they made a bad deal, it would’ve been much better. They would’ve given up a little bit and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years.”
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Hide AdHe added: “What deal can we make? It’s demolished. The people are dead. The country is in rubble.”
So it sounds like he would very much agree with this paraphrasing of Lord Haw-Haw: “The people of Ukraine will curse themselves for having preferred ruin from Zelensky to peace from Putin.”


Praise for Russia and Putin
Trump has also been praising Russia’s fighting spirit, saying: “They beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon. That’s what they do, they fight.” As for Zelensky, Trump has belittled him as the “greatest salesman on Earth”, while praising Putin in no uncertain terms, most shockingly in the early days of Putin’s full-scale invasion.
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Hide Ad“This is genius. Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine... Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump said. Following criticism, he defended his remarks: “They say, ‘Trump said Putin’s smart’. I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart. He’s taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”
Of course, the ‘cost’ of Putin’s invasion was incalculably higher than two dollars. It was a price paid with the lives of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and many civilians, callously ignored by Trump.
‘Historical unity’
An insight into his stance on Ukraine can be found in remarks by Fiona Hill, who served on the US National Security Council during Trump’s term of office, to David Sanger, author of a book called New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West.
Hill said that Trump had “made it very clear that he thought, you know, that Ukraine, and certainly Crimea, must be part of Russia. He really could not get his head around the idea that Ukraine was an independent state.”
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Hide AdSo, it sounds like he agrees with Putin, who laid out his bizarre thoughts in a 5,000-word essay entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. Published in 2021, it was seen by some far-sighted commentators as a declaration of war.
In the essay, Putin deployed ridiculous, pseudohistorical arguments to claim Russians and Ukrainians were “one people”, claimed “Russia was robbed” of its lands by Ukraine, and then concluded: “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”
Haw-Haw surprisingly popular
For many people, it is hard to fathom how men like Putin and Trump can be quite so popular in their respective countries. But then, so was Lord Haw-Haw. In January 1940, months after the outbreak of war, an astonishing four out of six adults in the UK either regularly or occasionally listened to his broadcasts from Nazi Germany.
According to the Imperial War Museum, “Lord Haw-Haw had become the number one radio personality of the war. Smith's Electric Clocks produced an advertisement... with the caption: 'Don't risk missing Haw-Haw. Get a clock that shows the right time always, unquestionably.’”
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Hide AdSome listened because they found him unintentionally funny. But others liked parts of what he had to say. An RAF airman interviewed for the war-time Mass Observation programme said that, while most of Joyce’s statements were lies or propaganda, “occasionally he hits the nail on the head. It’s then that he makes you think”.
However, his appeal soon began to fade. Another interviewee said: “I think that, secretly, we are rather terrified by the appalling things he says. The cool way he tells us of the decline of democracy and so on. I hate it: it frightens me.”
Staunch Republicans like Liz Cheney fear Trump and his supporters may destroy US democracy. We can only hope enough Americans today are terrified by that prospect to ensure his election defeat. And we must never let the new Lord Haw-Haw talk us into abandoning fellow democrats fighting to preserve their freedom in Ukraine.
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