The Hot Screen has found itself in a conundrum when grappling with the overall story of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 election. At this stage, a full year later, there are so many threads to follow that it often feels overwhelming to keep up, much less synthesize what we’ve heard and read into anything worth sharing with our readers. In this way, the Russia story is a (very big) microcosm of the American experience since Trump’s election: seldom, if ever, in most of our lifetimes has there been so much critical and disturbing news that constantly threatens our ability to absorb and assess it.
But some recent articles are shining a light on the particular reasons why the overload feels so very dramatic. First, Talking Points Memo has posted what for me has been the single most useful article I’ve read regarding the Russia investigation in recent weeks. Focused on disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, it makes the critical point that major parts of the story don’t really make sense until we realize that we’ve all been trying to understand not simply the facts of a static plot hatched by Team Trump, but a plot that began to twist and turn still more as the plotters reacted to the fact that they were being investigated by both the federal government (i.e., the FBI and intelligence agencies) and the press. As Marshall puts it,
[T]he logic of events only really comes into focus when we realize that there was a sort of race taking place between the Trump team’s effort to arrange a rapid rapprochement with Russia in the first weeks of January and February and a mix of the intelligence community, the national security apparatus and the press piecing together what had happened during the 2016 election. Imagine it as a starting pistol firing off on the morning of November 9th, with both teams racing to get more of their critical work done by the end of January.
As Marshall proceeds to detail, this “race” helps explain, among other things, Flynn’s otherwise strangely reckless behavior, particularly in relation to his pre-inauguration contacts with the Russian ambassador.
But this observation about the complicated interaction between the collusion plot and effort to uncover it also helps lay bare another way to understand the underlying arc of what we’ve been learning. First, it helps to think that there are three distinct but interrelated phases to the collusion effort. One is the pre-election period in which Russia rendered assistance to the Trump campaign; the second is the post-election period, including prior to Trump’s inauguration, in which the Trump team tried to make good on its half of the Faustian bargain it had made, including through diplomatic concessions beneficial to Russia; and the third comprises the efforts by the Trump administration to hide the existence of these first two parts from view, both at the time they happened and continuing into the present.
This taxonomy seems glaringly obvious now. Again, we have to ask: Why has even such a basic framework felt so elusive? Two particular reasons occur to us. The first is a point elaborated in a second recent TPM article, which details the ways in which multiple members of the Trump administration have lied publicly about their knowledge of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador. The larger point this suggests is that the White House, amplified by the right-wing media, has knowingly constructed a false narrative to cover their tracks — essentially, the implementation of the third “cover-up” phase I noted above. I’ll return to this point sooner or later, but for now I want to at least state it more acutely: the White House appears to have engaged in what can rightly be termed a massive conspiracy to cover up the equally massive conspiracy involving the Trump team's relationship to Russia during the election and beyond.
The second major reason I think it’s been so difficult to understand the elements of the narrative is that the basic existence of collusion has felt elusive, even for those of us who closely follow this story. This is deeply related to the word "collusion" itself, which as various people have noted is not necessarily a term of law but more of a general concept. But as Brian Beutler notes over at Crooked Media, for their own separate reasons both the media and Trump defenders have stressed the legal definition as paramount in judging whether anything malign occurred between Russia and Trump’s team. Beutler goes on to makes the case that despite such hedging in the media and outright denials by Trump partisans, collusion is at this point, by any reasonable understanding of the word, an established fact:
We know that Russian spies approached the Trump campaign offering assistance in the election multiple times. At least twice, Russians dangled the lure of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, including stolen emails, and both times, Trump campaign officials (George Papadopoulos and Donald Trump, Jr.) expressed interest. Trump, Jr. was particularly enthusiastic about the idea of cooperating with the Russians, and shortly after he welcomed Russian spies to Trump tower for a meeting about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, he coordinated messaging with Wikileaks, which operated last summer and fall as a cutout for Russian hackers.
After repeatedly communicating to Russia (in public and in private) that they welcomed interference in the election, Trump and his aides cast public doubt on whether the saboteurs were Russians at all. When Trump went on to win the election after benefiting from this interference, members of his inner circle, through Michael Flynn, secretly connived with Russia to subvert the countermeasures the American government had undertaken as penalties for Russia’s interference.
[...]
“Whether or not these actions amounted to a crime,” writes former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa, “it was a coordinated, covert effort directly against the interests of the United States. It threw off what was likely a lot of planning and analyses and contingencies that various agencies had prepared. I think when we focus exclusively on the criminality aspect, we (continue to) miss how these efforts essentially aided and abetted a hostile foreign state who attacked our country. That is the big picture.”
If the story were to end where we are right now, with no further confessions or indictments or revelations, it would still amount to the biggest scandal in American political history.
[...] At this point, to say collusion allegations remain unproven is materially misleading. Collusion has been conclusively proven; we are in the process of learning how extensive it was, and whether, in the course of it, American conspirators committed federal crimes.
Beutler’s piece is one of the clearest statements I’ve read about where we are vis-a-vis the existence of collusion; but even his effort feels like it founders somewhat under the burden of using this term, even as he digs into the use and abuse of the word, and to spell out what he himself means by collusion. The Hot Screen wonders if it might be more helpful, more clarifying for the public discussion, if we moved closer to the language of the FBI agent Beutler quotes — that the efforts of the Trump administration “aided and abetted a hostile foreign state who attacked our country.” Whether or not any laws were broken, such activity is, for purposes of American politics, utterly damning for those who carried it out; using "collusion" as some sort of shorthand seems to obscure the actual activity engaged in.
As Beutler writes, journalists and Trump partisans both have their reasons for insisting on a more legalistic definition of collusion. But conversely — and here we arrive at another major reason for the fog of obscurity around the term — Trump’s opponents find benefits in keeping alive the term’s ambiguity. While the president's defenders spin “collusion” into meaning whether or not a specific law was broken, his adversaries benefit from the non-legalistic reading of the term, because it suggests malfeasance even if no law was broken. That is, keeping the term “collusion” relatively vague allows them to keep damaging suspicions about Trump in public view without getting tied down to questions of whether specific laws were broken.
But this raises yet another question: now that we’re at a point where we can say with sureness that Trump’s campaign and then administration conspired with the Russians to subvert the U.S. elections, and subsequently acted to cover up their behavior, why aren’t more Trump opponents speaking up about this fact? That is, why are they still either embracing the perspective that we don’t know yet if any laws were broken, or refusing to assert directly that Trump’s team participated in an attack against our country?
I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of possible and reasonable explanations for holding their fire. Maybe they have faith that Robert Mueller will find evidence of law-breaking, and fear making partisan attacks when Mueller might have proof that could persuade even some Trump supporters of Trump’s bad behavior? Maybe they look at their minority status in Congress and see that they lack the power to do anything? Or perhaps they don’t think asserting the existence of treasonous behavior will be effective unless we have direct evidence of President Trump’s involvement (in fact, this distinction between the activities of Trump versus the rest of his team is yet another reason for the fog around the term “collusion” — if the president himself didn’t collude, was it so bad?)
But our guess is that the central reason that more Trump opponents aren't making the case that his team essentially committed treason is that all of us, individually and collectively, lack a framework for fully comprehending the scale of the bad acts before us. There are few, if any, worse political offenses in a democracy than conspiring with another country to subvert your own country’s election process, and then acting in ways that benefit that meddling country. But trying to write about it, these words seem disproportionate, grandiose and insufficient all at once. It feels like writing about the plot of a spy novel. We try to comprehend what has happened, and despite our best efforts still find ourselves wandering in the interminable mists of collusion.
This failure, or more charitably, this difficulty of full comprehension, exists for so many of us because full comprehension can only occur when you also feel it fully; and to feel it fully means to enter into a state of rage and helplessness. Because it is not at all clear what to do, even while it is equally clear that this situation cannot stand. A president whose campaign conspired with a foreign power to win him the presidency is an illegitimate president, regardless of whether laws were broken or whether or not he would have won anyway. If a country does not recognize and repudiate treason, then it isn’t really a country.
But it’s also clear that the response to such an attack on our democracy requires a doubling-down on democracy in response: on collective, non-violent action to restore ourselves to an accountable, legitimate government. With immediate impeachment impossible, given that the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the overriding goal would be to force the resignation of President Trump and those who participated in both the collusion and the cover-up.
It may feel like a secondary issue, but our ability to comprehend and build the necessary collective action to address this challenge is deeply hobbled by the left’s discomfort with a discourse of patriotism. This may be because of how thoroughly the right has co-opted and transformed competing conceptions of patriotism into an increasingly nationalistic, militaristic, grandiose ideology more akin to the propagandistic mindset of authoritarianism. In opposition to this, it may be that those of us who believe in a democratic, tolerant, and law-abiding United States need to find our way to a public solidarity based on our shared hopes and aspirations, mutual respect, and understanding that collectively we are much more powerful than the sum of our parts.
