Adam Davidson at The New Yorker ends his most recent reflections on the state of the Russia investigation with an appraisal that cuts through the sprawl and still-redacted spaces of the whole sordid story. Even if we were to learn still more than what we do now about Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, he says,
[W]e are already in an unbearable condition. The President of the United States knowingly and eagerly participated in a scheme with a hostile foreign leader who he knew was seeking to influence the Presidential election. Trump sought to profit politically and financially, many of his closest subordinates executed this effort, and he then was aware of and, it seems likely, encouraged an illegal effort to hide these facts. His reckless, unpatriotic actions have left him compromised by at least one but likely many foreign powers and have left his election open to reasonable questions about its legitimacy. And, every day, he sets policies and makes decisions that have an impact on the lives of all Americans and the fortunes of the very autocrats who hold sway over him. It cannot stand.
Part of what’s striking here is that Davidson is limiting himself only to the known information about Trump’s efforts to build the Moscow tower, including revelations in Friday’s filings against Michael Cohen that they were more extensive and went on longer than previously known. Equally striking is how concisely and plainly he sets forth a complicated set of circumstances into plain and morally urgent English that sets our political crisis in bright relief. Trump’s efforts to hide the truth of what he did were not simply attempts to deceive a public that was deciding whether to elect him president, but also made him subject to coercion by other countries who were aware of his actions. I think Davidson’s conclusion is irrefutable, which leads us to this question: Why aren’t Democrats making the case that this well-respected New Yorker writer already is? What on earth is stopping them from making a concerted effort to accurately and effectively communicate the stakes of the Russia investigation to the American people?
Davidson isn’t the only one who’s made this point, but his clarity is hard to beat. The inexorable conclusion is that talk of impeachment and further investigations by the incoming Democratic majority are in important ways simply efforts to avoid the more fundamental crisis staring us in the face, a crisis that hardly consists of this one thread of the Moscow Trump Tower but includes the president’s payoff of women in order to sway the 2016 presidential election, his campaign’s clear and documented willingness to accept assistance from the Russian government and not notify the FBI of such efforts, and the mounting evidence that there was coordination between Trump’s campaign and the Russians.
Escalating the situation still further is the fact that the president’s own party has defended the president tooth and nail through the present — even when this meant hampering examination of the established Russian effort to interfere in the election, separate and apart from whether there was collusion with the Trump campaign. That is, the GOP has made itself party to the president’s own unacceptable behavior, which means that they have an interest in continuing to protect him even in face of still more damning revelations to come.
The Washington Post’s weekend survey of how the GOP is taking the recent bad news on the Cohen front does not provide much ground for optimism. Those Republicans interviewed seem to break into two camps: those who are in denial of the extremity of the president’s peril, and those who see the way forward in purely political terms. One Trump-supporting Republic senator does draw the line at evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and the Russians, at which point “then they’ve lost me.” But what, for the GOP, would constitute evidence, if even the results of an FBI investigation are dismissed by the president as the fictions of the “deep state”?
This gets to another key point that opponents of the president need to be making in a coordinated fashion. All the talk of process and the president staffing up and hunkering down distracts from the horrific reality at the base of it all —the president appears to have secured his election by illegitimate means, both by breaking campaign finance laws (in the case of his payoffs to women he’d slept with) and (far more critically) by the assistance he accepted and cultivated from the Russian government. That is, we’re not talking about whether the president broke a random law or two — we’re talking about a basic illegitimacy, compounded by the danger he’s put the U.S. in by placing himself under the influence of foreign governments aware of his unconscionable acts.
The irony couldn’t be greater: while Trump’s white nationalist staffers bleat on about how the United States isn’t really a sovereign nation if it can’t secure its borders against refugees, the entirety of the GOP has turned a blind eye to evidence that a foreign government helped pick the U.S. president, and now exercises malign influence on his decision-making: a lot of good that strong borders do, when you hand the White House keys to the authoritarians in the Kremlin!
Though the various threads and sheer volume of information are overwhelming, it is quite possible to construct and communicate a clear narrative of what Trump did wrong, what the GOP has done wrong in defending him, and that we face the question of whether Americans are to be citizens of a democracy or the dupes of a con man. As I’ve said before, this is not an either/or in terms of the Democrats having a positive agenda for America; in fact, it’s entirely the opposite. We will never have world-class education for all, and health care for all, and economic security for all, and a healthy climate for all, if our president and the GOP put personal and party interest over country. There is no value that Republicans purport to defend that is not made into a sick joke by their defense of a president beholden to a foreign power, and so absurdly stuck on the notion of making money that he’s happy to sell his own country down the river.
This isn’t any sort of hyper-patriotism I’m arguing for; it’s more of a baseline but nonnegotiable position that our country is nothing without fair elections, and that the Democrats are nothing without making defense of democracy, including elections, central to their identity as a party. The GOP stands in the way of the future Americans need and deserve. Every day that they take the side of Trump and Russia over the United States is another day that climate change becomes harder to stop; is another day that we’re getting no closer to universal health care; is another day that we’re not talking about real reforms that could help people left behind by the 21st century economy.
Let’s not forget, too, that we’ve been frozen into a red-blue mindset for so long that too many people are convinced that this is the permanent state of things, rather than the product of limited political imagination. That Washington Post story I cited notes that “The White House is adopting what one official termed a “shrugged shoulders” strategy for the Mueller findings, calculating that most GOP base voters will believe whatever the president tells them to believe.” This is truly amazing. The GOP’s voter-outreach strategy is now one of pure propaganda, relying on the idea that Republicans can no longer think for themselves. But surely most Republicans would be enraged to learn they’ve been duped by the president. What are the Democrats doing to reach those voters, or to channel their anger to good should matters reach a breaking point and they abandon the president en masse?