In 2016, The Russians were coming to attack us and most of us didn’t know. The National Security apparatus did, but failed to blow the whistle publicly, apparently because the Obama Administration figured it would look political. Besides, Hillary could slap Putin around after she won. Oops.
The Trump campaign, on the other hand, was both witting and willing to accept help. Shameless Rudy Giuliani, a former prosecutor who has turned his coat, was sent out recently to say that any campaign would have accepted help from a malign foreign power that wished America ill. Really?
Legally, the Trump campaign may not have committed a crime that can be proven, and it is apparent Trump and the amoral, subversive crowd around him was cool with getting in bed with an enemy of the state, but Trump was not cool with his reliance on Russian interference becoming known.
Much of the ranting, witness tampering, and obstructive behavior detailed by Mueller has to do with Trump’s attempts to cover up the fact that he had Russian help winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote. The thought of this becoming public offended his gargantuan vanity. It made him look like an illegitimate president, or even worse, a “loser.”
He learned at his father’s knee you were either a “killer” or a “loser.” So, if cyberwar waged by Putin and Assange, assisted by Manafort, Stone, Parscale, Cambridge Analytica, Kushner, Don Jr. and the rest of the Trump cast of trolls could make him a winner, it was fine as long as he got all the credit.
Less partisan, plain vanilla Americans may not be so sanguine about cynically winking at enemy action. Surely most of us think welcoming help from an enemy of the state to win an election is bad, even unpatriotic, regardless of whether the law has failed to catch up with our digital reality.
Putting self before party and party before country is ugly. Lying about accepting such tainted aid, engaging in a cover-up, denouncing investigators for a witch hunt and journalists for fake news is even worse.
But Trump is guilty of something far worse than all of that. Something Mueller’s investigation ignored. Trump has done nothing about the attack. It’s as if FDR on December 7th, 1941 called Pearl Harbor fake news instead of infamy.
Has Trump furiously denounced Russian meddling? Demanded a comprehensive investigation of it? Ordered his intelligence services to devise an all-out defense against it, so that it never happens again? Called for robust funding to protect the security of elections in 2018 and 2020? Devised ways to retaliate against cyber-attackers to deter them from ever daring to undermine out democratic institutions again? Instead of his absurd Space Force has he proposed an Election Security Force?
No.No.No.No.No.No.
Mueller seems to suggest Trump’s weird reluctance to react with fury to this assault on American democracy is due to Trump’s amour propre. Surely his ego is an issue, but as in Watergate Trump had and continues to have a cancer growing on his presidency. In his case, what he called “the Russia thing.” The obvious solution is to attack the enemy. Why doesn’t he?
Some think he just likes autocrats who share his contempt for the public and like stealing from them. Some think, as the Steele dossier suggested, the Russians have dirt on him worse than anything they found on Hillary. Some think he doesn’t really care about anything but his own self-aggrandizement.
But it may also be he doesn’t want to meddle with Putin because he knows he needed Putin’s help in 2016 and may need it even more in 2020. In that case, sanctions, counter measures, or other normal responses to such an attack would be counterproductive.
This would certainly explain his constant laments in the Mueller Report that the “Russia thing” was impeding his presidency. He didn’t complain that it was preventing him from making America great again, building a wall, cutting taxes for billionaires. No. He complained it was making it hard for him to “do anything with Russia, there’s things I’d like to do with Russia….”
This seems very odd. We have been attacked and Trump’s concern is not how to retaliate and prevent the attacker from undermining American democracy again, but how to end the investigation so he can do deals with the attacker. Are we looking at a quid pro quo in plain sight? Trump owes Putin for 2016? Trump may need Putin again in 2020?
Watergate was bad, an earlier attempt to win an election by any means necessary. but the irony is that in Nixon’s case it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t need chicanery to win 49 states, 520 electoral votes and the popular vote by a margin of 61 to 38 percent.
By contrast, Trump might not have won without “the Russia thing” since he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and only won the electoral college by 70,000 votes in three toss-up states. They were helpfully identified in Trump campaign polling that Manafort shared with Putin’s apparatus.
Nixon was impeached on three counts. Has Trump not done the same three things? Article 1: covering up, concealing and protecting those responsible for an attack on an election, Article II: impairing inquiries into such behavior, and Article III: failing to produce evidence demanded by congressional investigators?
And isn’t Putin’s elaborate and multi-pronged attack on a presidential election more alarming than attempts to steal political intelligence illegally from the opposition party’s office? Many former prosecutors, constitutional scholars, and national security professionals think so.
Yet, the House may not impeachment, and Mitch McConnell’s Senate is unlikely to convict. John Dean thinks that Nixon might also have survived if there had been a Fox News, and social media in 1974 to cloud men’s minds.
Call me a naive, old fuddy-duddy, but giving aid and comfort to an enemy in exchange for stealing an election used to be a pretty big deal. Like Benedict Arnold big. Is a country capable of electing Trump incapable of telling political sharp elbows from betraying one’s country? We shall see.