In just three weeks, President Donald Trump has exploded long-standing U.S. foreign policy and sided with Russia against Ukraine and the rest of NATO. He sent American diplomats to open negotiations with Russian counterparts—without inviting Kyiv to participate. He falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and echoed the Kremlin line by calling Ukrainian President Zelensky a “dictator.” Then, in a press conference on Monday, Trump declined to say the same of Putin. “I don’t use those words lightly,” he told a reporter.

Most Republicans strongly condemned Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and have voted on multiple occasions to send the country military aid. But with their party’s leader back in the White House, many of them have grown quiet. Are any GOP lawmakers willing to say, in plain terms, what is true?

I reached out to all 271 Republican members of the House and Senate to find out, asking each of them two straightforward questions: Did Russia invade Ukraine? And is Putin a dictator? So far, I have received 19 responses.

Some members were unambiguous: “Yes and yes,” a spokesperson for Senator Susan Collins of Maine replied in an email. “Vladimir is undisputedly an enemy of America and a dictator,” read part of the statement from the office of Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado.

Others chose to send excerpts of previous non-answer statements or links to past TV interviews rather than answer either “yes” or “no.” A spokesperson for the GOP’s House leader, Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, replied only with a readout of Johnson’s praise for Trump’s deal-making prowess. A spokesperson for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas replied with a link to an interaction with ChatGPT in which the chatbot noted that Cruz had in 2022 acknowledged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and did in 2020 call Putin a dictator. (Still, no straightforward “yes” from Cruz today.)

The House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Representative Brian Mast of Florida, opted to stake out a position that seemed different from Trump’s: The panel posted a screenshot of our questions on X, with the caption: “ON THE RECORD: Russia invaded Ukraine & Putin is a dictator. But that doesn’t mean our European allies shouldn’t match Russian military spending & recruitment.” (Another post referred to our questions as “BS.”) The Atlantic followed up to ask whether this statement represented Mast’s personal view, but received no further response.

Others refused to answer entirely: “Does the Atlantic believe we’re here to answer gotcha questions to advance narrow opinion journalism?” Jonathan Wilcox, communications director for Representative Darrell Issa of California, said in an email.

In fact, it is clearly in the public interest to know how elected officials, particularly those who make decisions about national security, regard foreign powers that have long positioned themselves against the United States. And it is also clearly in the public interest for citizens to know if their representatives’ views have shifted on who is—or is not—a foreign adversary.

What follows is the full list of responses from every Republican member of Congress. It will be regularly updated with any additional responses.

Lawmakers Who Answered the Questions

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska: A spokesperson pointed to a statement on X from Bacon on February 19, in which he said: “Putin started this war. Putin committed war crimes. Putin is the dictator who murdered his opponents. The EU nations have contributed more to Ukraine. Zelensky polls over 50%. Ukraine wants to be part of the West, Putin hates the West. I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”

Representative Michael Baumgartner of Washington: “The Congressman expressed all his thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine War to the Spokane-Review on February 19. He was very clear that Russia and Vladimir Putin were the aggressors of the war in Ukraine,” a spokesman said, adding this link.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine: “As Senator Collins has said multiple times, yes and yes,” a spokesperson said.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas: A spokesperson shared this link, pointing to earlier statements the senator had made about Putin and the Ukraine war.

Senator John Curtis of Utah: A spokesperson pointed to Curtis’s bipartisan resolution supporting Ukraine and a February 25 interview on KSL NewsRadio, in which Curtis said, “Ukraine was invaded by a dictator.”

Representative Julie Fedorchak of North Dakota: “Yes, Vladimir Putin and Russia invaded Ukraine and yes, he is a dictator,” the representative told me. “This war has cost countless lives and destabilized the world. I believe President Trump has the strength and leadership to bring peace and restore stability in a way that puts America’s interests first.”

Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado: “Did Russia invade Ukraine? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an unprovoked act of war. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a dictator? Vladimir is undisputedly an enemy of America and a dictator. It is dishonorable and wrong not to stand up against the tyranny of Putin,” a spokesperson said.

Representative Young Kim of California: “Yes to both,” a spokesperson said.

Representative Brian Mast of Florida: A spokesperson for Mast sent a link to a post on X from the House Foreign Affairs Committee calling The Atlantic’s inquiry “BS” and declaring it would cancel its subscription to our magazine. “ON THE RECORD: Russia invaded Ukraine & Putin is a dictator. But that doesn’t mean our European allies shouldn’t match Russian military spending & recruitment. Europe must realize that for our alliance to be the strongest in history, America needs a Europe that can hold its own.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: A spokesperson sent a link to a statement in which the senator said that Russia launched an “unprovoked war on Ukraine.” The spokesperson added: “And yes, she does believe that Vladimir Putin is a dictator.”

Representative Austin Scott of Georgia: “Russia invaded Ukraine and is the aggressor in this war,” the representative told me. “Putin is a dictator who has invaded Ukraine multiple times—this war would end today if he would pull his troops back into Russia.”

Senator Todd Young of Indiana: “Yes and yes,” a spokesperson said.

Lawmakers Who Responded But Did Not Directly Answer the Questions

Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas: A spokesman provided a link to an interview with Piers Morgan in which Crenshaw cautioned against returning to a pre-World War II order allowing “dictators to conquer other countries and take their stuff.”

Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio: A spokesperson said the representative declined to comment.

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa: “Like all Americans, Ernst wants to see an end to Putin’s unjust war that has cost far too many lives,” a spokesperson said

Representative French Hill of Arkansas: A spokesperson did not address the question of whether Putin is a dictator, but sent a link to an Arkansas PBS interview in which the representative said, “this war was started by Vladimir Putin,” and that “Ukraine has to be at the table” for any peace deal

Representative Darrell Issa of California: A spokesperson said, “Does the Atlantic believe we’re here to answer gotcha questions to advance narrow opinion journalism?”

Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana: A spokesperson sent over Johnson’s recent comments during this week’s GOP leadership press conference about Trump’s dealmaking skills and his desire for peace in Ukraine, but did not answer either question directly.

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama: A spokesperson did not answer directly but sent a link to an interview with Newsmax, in which the senator said, “President Trump is not a Putin apologist. He just wants to get the war over with.”

Senate Republicans Who Have Not Responded

Jim Banks
John Barrasso
Marsha Blackburn
John Boozman
Katie Britt
Ted Budd
Shelley Moore Capito
Bill Cassidy
John Cornyn
Tom Cotton
Kevin Cramer
Mike Crapo
Steve Daines
Deb Fischer
Lindsay Graham
Charles Grassley
Bill Hagerty
Josh Hawley
John Hoeven
Jon Husted
Cindy Hyde-Smith
Ron Johnson
Jim Justice
John Neely Kennedy
James Lankford
Mike Lee
Cynthia Lummis
Roger Marshall
Mitch McConnell
Dave McCormick
Ashley Moody
Jerry Moran
Bernie Moreno
Markwayne Mullin
Rand Paul
Pete Ricketts
James Risch
Mike Rounds
Eric Schmitt
Rick Scott
Tim Scott
Tim Sheehy
Dan Sullivan
John Thune
Thom Tillis
Roger Wicker

House Republicans Who Have Not Responded

Robert Aderholt
Mark Alford
Rick Allen
Mark Amodei
Jodey Arrington
Brian Babin
James Baird
Troy Balderson
Andy Barr
Tom Barrett
Aaron Bean
Nick Begich
Cliff Bentz
Jack Bergman
Stephanie Bice
Andy Biggs
Sheri Biggs
Gus Bilirakis
Lauren Boebert
Mike Bost
Josh Brecheen
Rob Bresnahan
Vern Buchanan
Tim Burchett
Eric Burlison
Ken Calvert
Kat Cammack
Mike Carey
John Carter
Earl Buddy Carter
Juan Ciscomani
Ben Cline
Michael Cloud
Andrew Clyde
Tom Cole
Mike Collins
James Comer
Eli Crane
Jeff Crank
Eric Rick Crawford
Monica De La Cruz
Scott DesJarlais
Mario Diaz-Balart
Byron Donalds
Troy Downing
Neal Dunn
Beth Van Duyne
Chuck Edwards
Jake Ellzey
Tom Emmer
Ron Estes
Gabe Evans
Mike Ezell
Pat Fallon
Randy Feenstra
Brad Finstad
Michelle Fischbach
Scott Fitzgerald
Brian Fitzpatrick
Charles Chuck Fleischmann
Mike Flood
Vince Fong
Virginia Foxx
Scott Franklin
Russell Fry
Russ Fulcher
Andrew Garbarino
Brandon Gill
Carlos Gimenez
Craig Goldman
Tony Gonzales
Lance Gooden
Paul Gosar
Sam Graves
Mark Green
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Morgan Griffith
Glenn Grothman
Michael Guest
Brett Guthrie
Harriet Hageman
Abe Hamadeh
Mike Haridopolos
Pat Harrigan
Andy Harris
Mark Harris
Diana Harshbarger
Kevin Hern
Clay Higgins
Ashley Hinson
Erin Houchin
Richard Hudson
Bill Huizenga
Wesley Hunt
Brian Jack
Ronny Jackson
John James
Dusty Johnson
Jim Jordan
David Joyce
John Joyce
Thomas Kean
Mike Kelly
Trent Kelly
Mike Kennedy
Jennifer Kiggans
Kevin Kiley
Brad Knott
David Kustoff
Darin LaHood
Nick LaLota
Doug LaMalfa
Nicholas Langworthy
Robert Latta
Michael Lawler
Laurel Lee
Julia Letlow
Barry Loudermilk
Frank Lucas
Anna Paulina Luna
Morgan Luttrell
Nancy Mace
Ryan Mackenzie
Nicole Malliotakis
Celeste Maloy
Tracey Mann
Thomas Massie
Michael McCaul
Lisa McClain
Tom McClintock
Richard McCormick
Addison McDowell
John McGuire
Mark Messmer
Daniel Meuser
Carol Miller
Mary Miller
Max Miller
Mariannette Miller-Meeks
Cory Mills
John Moolenaar
Barry Moore
Blake Moore
Riley Moore
Tim Moore
Nathaniel Moran
Greg Murphy
Troy Nehls
Dan Newhouse
Ralph Norman
Zach Nunn
Jay Obernolte
Andrew Ogles
Bob Onder
Burgess Owens
Gary Palmer
Scott Perry
August Pfluger
Guy Reschenthaler
Hal Rogers
Mike Rogers
John Rose
David Rouzer
Chip Roy
Michael Rulli
John Rutherford
Maria Elvira Salazar
Steve Scalise
Derek Schmidt
David Schweikert
Keith Self
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
Michael Simpson
Adrian Smith
Christopher Smith
Jason Smith
Lloyd Smucker
Victoria Spartz
Pete Stauber
Elise Stefanik
Bryan Steil
Greg Steube
Dale Strong
Marlin Stutzman
Dave Taylor
Claudia Tenney
Glenn GT Thompson
Thomas Tiffany
William Timmons
Mike Turner
David Valadao
Jefferson Van Drew
Derrick Van Orden
Ann Wagner
Tim Walberg
Randy Weber
Daniel Webster
Bruce Westerman
Roger Williams
Joe Wilson
Tony Wied
Robert Wittman
Steve Womack
Rudy Yakym
Ryan Zinke

With additional research and reporting by Amogh Dimri, Marc Novicoff, Gisela Salim-Peyer, and Annie Joy Williams.

The rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk is entering its Apprentice era. Both men have the ambition to redefine how the modern world works—and both are jockeying for President Donald Trump’s blessing to accelerate their plans.

Altman’s company, OpenAI, as well as Musk’s ventures—which include SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI—all depend to some degree on federal dollars, permits, and regulatory support. The president could influence whether OpenAI or xAI produces the next major AI breakthrough, whether Musk can succeed in sending a human to Mars, and whether Altman’s big bet on nuclear energy, and fusion reactors in particular, pans out.

Understanding the competition between these two men helps illuminate Trump’s particular style of governing—one defined by patronage and dealmaking. And the rivalry highlights the tech giants’ broader capitulation to the new administration. Executives who have sold a vision of the future defined by ultra-intelligent computer programs, interplanetary travel, and boundless clean energy have bowed to a commander in chief who has already stifled free expression, scientific research, and the mere mention of climate change in government work. Why? Simply because doing so will advance their interests. (And, in some cases, because tech leaders are true believers—ideological adherents to the MAGA worldview.)

Altman’s MAGA turn is best understood as a search for a lifeline. In 2017, as Trump’s first term was just beginning, Altman tweeted, “I think Trump is terrible and few things would make me happier than him not being president.” This time around: “I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” In the months before the election, Altman and OpenAI leaned on connections to Trump allies to curry favor, according to The New York Times. In June, two of the start-up’s executives met with Trump in Las Vegas, showcasing their technology and emphasizing its land and energy needs. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s technological lead over xAI, Google, Anthropic, and other firms has dwindled.

The company’s relationship with its main financial backer, Microsoft, has also frayed so much that OpenAI is actively courting other corporate partners. (Microsoft, despite approving OpenAI’s ability to find other data-center partners, maintains that it will remain a key partner going forward.) Over the past year, a number of senior researchers have departed, and the start-up faces several lawsuits and investigations. A new and friendly administration, then, could provide Altman with a much-needed boost to maintain his firm’s shrinking edge in the AI race. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

And Musk, for all his criticism of federal bloat, is plenty dependent on the government. Over the past decade, his companies have been awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts. SpaceX relies heavily on NASA for its rocket business and as of Monday is reportedly testing its Starlink technology to improve the Federal Aviation Administration’s national airspace system, despite an existing $2 billion contract that the FAA has with Verizon. Tesla, with shrinking sales and a relatively stagnant lineup of models, could benefit mightily from friendly regulation of self-driving cars. Musk also appears jealous of Altman’s it-boy reputation in Silicon Valley and beyond: He started xAI within months of ChatGPT’s launch, has taken to calling his rival “Scam Altman,” and recently led an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI (which the start-up’s board refused). “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity,” Altman told Bloomberg Television the next day. “I feel for the guy.”

Anything that OpenAI might gain from Trump, xAI could reap as well. Altman and Musk both hope to build data centers that use a tremendous amount of electricity—each one potentially requiring as much as would be provided by a large nuclear reactor or even several, a demand equal to millions of American homes. The government can open federal lands to data-center and power-plant construction, and it can expedite the construction of natural-gas or nuclear plants (or the now-less-likely renewable-energy sources). Trump could attempt to cut down the sometimes interminable permitting process for the transmission lines that carry that electricity to data centers. He might intervene in or make it difficult to enforce the outcomes of AI copyright litigation, and generally make the regulatory environment as friendly as possible for the industry and its investors.

[Read: For now, there’s only one good way to power AI]

Musk, of course, has cemented his place in the president’s inner circle, acting as a Trump surrogate during the campaign and now leading his efforts to remake the civil service. He has fused his political ideology—reactionary, authoritarian, nativist—with Trump’s. But Altman, too, has quietly gained the president’s confidence, albeit with a much narrower appeal to American-AI dominance. His company has ramped up its public messaging and lobbying about the importance of America’s AI leadership over China—a goal that Trump has repeatedly emphasized as a priority.

The maneuvering is already starting to pay off. The day after the inauguration, Altman stood beside Trump in the White House as the president announced Stargate, a new company planning to spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure, and in which OpenAI is a principal investor. According to the Times, Altman had struggled to raise money for Stargate for months—potential investors worried that government approval for the necessary, extensive construction would be too slow—until Trump’s victory, when sentiment flipped. During the press conference, Trump said the government’s job would be “to make it as easy as it can be” to build. Altman was sure to signal gratitude, saying that “with a different president, [Stargate] might not have been possible.”

Within hours of the announcement, Musk, not to be excluded or outdone, chimed in on X. “They don’t actually have the money,” he wrote, suggesting that Stargate’s main investors could not fund the project. Altman denied this, writing on X, “I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [America] first.”

[Read: OpenAI goes MAGA]

For Musk to break ranks with his newfound presidential ally suggests that the world’s richest man is still focused on an old grudge and affront to his ego. After being one of OpenAI’s initial investors, Musk left its board in 2018, at the time citing potential conflicts of interest with future AI projects at Tesla. Four years later, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and kicked off the generative-AI boom, Musk was caught off guard—not just behind in the race, but not even an entrant. Within weeks, he was suggesting that the chatbot was too “woke.” Soon after, Musk formed his own AI start-up, xAI, and last year, he sued OpenAI for betraying its original nonprofit mission. In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI released old emails from Musk suggesting he had departed because he thought that without merging with Tesla or otherwise securing substantially more funding, OpenAI’s chance of “being relevant” was “0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.” (Oops.)

Ever since he left, Musk has been playing catch-up. The first and second iterations of xAI’s model, Grok, lagged behind the most powerful versions of ChatGPT. Musk’s latest, Grok 3, appears to be in the same ballpark as OpenAI’s new, state-of-the-art “reasoning” models—but xAI accomplished this months later and likely with far more computing resources. Despite, or perhaps because of, repeatedly coming up short, Musk has evinced a willingness to use any tactic to maintain his own relevance, or at least slow down his competitors. In late March 2023, Musk signed a widely circulated letter calling for at least six months’ pause on training AI models more powerful than OpenAI’s then-just-released GPT-4—even though he had incorporated xAI weeks earlier and was actively recruiting staff. Musk’s lawsuit denounces OpenAI as profit-hungry and secretive, and he has dubbed the start-up “ClosedAI,” but the code and training data underlying Grok 3 are as opaque as that of ChatGPT. And despite Musk’s claims that Grok 3 is the “smartest AI on Earth,” OpenAI researchers have accused his start-up of misrepresenting the chatbot’s performance to make it appear on par with their own top model, o3-mini (a sort of manipulation common in the generative-AI industry, and one that OpenAI itself has been accused of as well). Still, he is now closer than ever to catching Altman, and his position at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency and his perch on Trump’s shoulder could push him over the edge.

The president, for now, seems content to keep both relationships open; certainly, his association with two tech executives considered visionaries has its perks. Altman, with his tunnel vision on AI, seems unlikely to affect or sour Trump and Musk’s ideological bond and attempt to reshape the federal government. Perhaps the greater risk to xAI is that Musk overstays his MAGA welcome and attracts the president’s ire. And Musk does not appear to have turned Trump against OpenAI. When asked about Musk’s criticism of Stargate, the president shrugged it off: “He hates one of the people,” Trump told reporters. “But I have certain hatreds of people, too.”