At a session with reporters last week, President Trump addressed the ongoing investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He suggested that the Russia collusion story was a Democratic fabrication, that lives might be lost due to continued attention to the story, and that former intelligence officials who claimed its veracity were “hacks.” Most provocatively, though, he spoke about his recent interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit:
"Every time he sees me, he says, 'I didn't do that,' and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it. But he says, 'I didn't do that.' I think he is very insulted by it, if you want to know the truth. Don’t forget. All he said was he never did that, he didn’t do that. I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”
Plenty of politicians and pundits have jumped on the president’s acceptance of Putin’s assertions as naive or dangerous — naive if the president actually believes Putin, and dangerous for implying his trust in the Russians over American intelligence and reporting. But for the president to be naive is to assume that he doesn’t know any better, or doesn’t know about the Russian collusion with his campaign, both of which points are far from certain. Along the same lines, the danger is not just from Trump inadvisedly trusting the Russians, but from what it says about the president’s overall entanglement with that country. It’s hard to read the president’s remarks and not see him choosing at least to embrace the Russian version of events, which is deeply frightening considering the well-established fact that, putting aside the question of collusion for the moment, there is overwhelming evidence that the Russians interfered with the 2016 election and that they intend to continue such interference in the future.
But New York Daily Intelligencer writer Jonathan Chait has zeroed in on another part of Trump’s remarks — the part where he talks about how he thinks Putin is “insulted” by questions of Russian interference. Chait asserts that this superficially odd wording suggests darker possibilities in terms of President Trump’s relationship to Russia. First, he notes how out of keeping it is for Trump to worry about insulting another person — after all, Donald Trump’s main mode is one of dominance, in which insults of his enemies are tools of the trade; how odd for him to be worried about the feelings of another! It is as if Putin is in the dominant Trumpian role, and the president doesn’t want to provoke him; as Chait evocatively describes it, “Trump is speaking to his country like a cowering mother warning her children not to upset their father.”
Chait brings up the possibility that the Russians have compromising materials of a sexual or financial nature on Trump, pointing to some of the more salacious allegations in the Steele memo. This might nor might not be the case; but Trump’s most sensitive spot may just be the larger Russian influence effort in 2016, including the way it reached into his campaign; after all, this is a man who from day one has outwardly worried about his legitimacy and popularity on the basis of his popular vote loss and subpar inauguration crowds. But the president’s otherwise odd desire not to anger Putin need not be entirely rational. After all, no matter what the Russians say or do not say, the U.S. government and journalists have uncovered plenty of evidence that the Russians and the Trump campaign were working together. Appealing to Putin as some sort of authority figure who might weigh in on his side could be seen as having a delusional cast, as if by puffing up Putin’s terrible power the Russian president’s denials could somehow overshadow the hard facts uncovered in the real world.
I will lay some of my cards out on the table here and say that I wonder, when we are looking back on these dangerous times with the advantage of hindsight, whether we will be struck by how obvious it all was: how a president compromised by a foreign country used the power of his office to derail investigations of that compromise; how when he spoke his strange, uncharacteristic words about the Russian president that sounded like he was scared of what Putin could do to him, there really was information possessed by the Russians that could do him great harm; that Trump, as dangerous as he was to our democracy, was also a criminal who could not help but telegraph his guilt through actions large and small, from his firing of an FBI director to his curious, self-implicating palaver.
