With the waterfall of disclosures this past week around Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer with the premise of the Russian government providing support to his father’s campaign, the idea that the Trump campaign may have colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 election became much more concrete for a lot of people. And with these developments, it has become more important than ever, both politically for the Democrats and as a matter of defending the most basic notions of national security, to highlight how the Republican Party has been a crucial enabler of the president’s efforts to evade accountability on Russia’s role in the past election.
To this point, Jeet Heer at the New Republic considers the evidence of Republican Russia-related obstructionism. The list is damning, from Mitch McConnell’s now-notorious resistance to a bipartisan statement at the behest of President Obama about Russian interference during the 2016 campaign, to the unethical antics of Representative Kevin Nunes, to various Republicans’ disparagement of fired FBI Director James Comey. Heer suggests a possible conundrum for Democrats, between hoping that they can work with Republicans to impeach the president, and holding the Republicans to account for their complicity in protecting Trump, but at the expense of losing the cooperation necessary to bring the president to heel. Heer comes down on the side of hitting the Republicans on the issue, citing the foolhardiness of Democrats waiting for the G.O.P. to do the right thing.
In a similar vein, Brian Beutler points out that the Donald Jr.-Russian attorney meeting raises a bunch of uncomfortable questions for the president’s enablers. “Trump and his advisers didn’t just lie to the public, but to his partisan allies as well,” writes Beutler. “The most charitable read of the GOP leadership’s behavior is that they believed Trump’s lies and proceeded accordingly. Now that they know they were misled, we need to know what they intend to do about it.” He also states:
“As we now know, McConnell ran interference for Trump to stop President Barack Obama from warning the country about a Russian subversion campaign that Trump not only knew to exist, but with which he actively collaborated. . . That abdication carried a rotten stench even before we knew how solicitous the Trump campaign was of Russian meddling. But now we know that the proof McConnell supposedly needed was sitting idly in multiple inboxes at Trump campaign headquarters. Until Tuesday, he and other Republicans could escape scrutiny for their conduct by hiding behind the sensitivity of the deliberations. Now the best they can say for their behavior is that they unwittingly abetted Trump’s collusion with the Russian government because they fell for his lies. The alternative is that they made a conscious decision to allow Russian subversion of the election to continue unimpeded. The country deserves to know where the truth resides.”
The press needs to ask these questions, but just as importantly, so do the Democrats. As a political matter, they need to exploit the divisions that the Trumpsters’ dissembling have caused with his defenders — these Republicans have to be forced to choose between continuing to defend the president, and so further implicate themselves with his bad behavior, or force a rift that will weaken both the president and the GOP as a whole.
At this stage of the game, it seems to me that there’s no political downside to the Democrats going after the Republicans on their enabling of Donald Trump. I say this in light of the existential seriousness of the issues at play, and the escalating evidence that where collusion is concerned, smoke means fire. At the barest minimum, even if there was no collusion, Donald Trump quite arguably obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey to derail the investigation, even if it was only to protect his political agenda from distractions. At a bare minimum, that is, the Russia factor has caused Donald Trump to abuse the power of his office.
Of course, possible collusion with Russia is only the most heinous among a group of other actions Donald Trump has engaged in that reveal him as unfit for the presidency. As just one example, the speciousness of his claims that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election and subsequent creation of a task force to “investigate” this wholly fictitious issue cannot be overstated. As much as the Russian meddling, this is a direct assault on both the reality of what happened in 2016 — Donald Trump’s popular vote loss by millions of votes — and on the integrity of our elections going forward, a clear prelude to mass voter suppression. As Charles Blow puts it in a column this week that discusses the Don Jr. meeting and beyond, Donald Trump has declared war on our country — on its Constitution, its values, and its culture.
So the Democrats shouldn’t only be hitting Donald Trump on the Russia issue. Rather, it’s the worst of an impeachment-level group of sins that needs to be foregrounded in the nation’s political discussion. But it is of a piece with the others: it’s the president abusing his power to serve his own interests over those of the American people. Trump’s Russia ties are politically radioactive in a singular way; but even if it turns out there’s been no actual collusion, Democrats need to exact a price for the utter amorality of his and his campaign’s actions, even as they continue to hit him on these other issues.
But as a political matter, and as a basic recognition of how we got to this point, hitting Trump on his bad actions up to and including collusion with a hostile foreign power needs to always be coupled with the idea that Trump’s baggage is getting in the way of dealing with our country’s REAL challenges, and with the Democrats talking about what they’re going to do to fight inequality, create jobs, ensure free trade works for everyone, and saving our planet.
It does seem that the Democrats are inevitably in a bind not of their own making. Because of the utter seriousness of the threat Trump presents to our country, including possible collusion with a foreign power, they are essentially in a position of being naysayers. That is, there’s not a lot of room to maneuver here; outright opposition to him is called for. But no one says this can’t be linked to always putting forward what they’d be doing differently — all the good things that Trump’s incompetence is preventing. They can’t let Trump frame this as a fight between himself as the defender of ordinary Americans and an elite conspiracy out to get him.
