As Donald Trump escalates his war against the executive branch he was elected to lead, it’s become clear that his desperate efforts to avoid accountability for his campaign’s collusion with the Russian government have only made it this far because of the Republican Party’s willingness to protect him. Many commentators argue that the GOP is doing this out of the most basic of political calculations — Donald Trump will sign legislation that Congress wants, and damage to the president will also damage the party. The Hot Screen has tended to emphasize that the GOP interest goes beyond such a simple calculation, and that the party has long been sliding towards the authoritarian, anti-democratic positioning that the president has fully embraced: from this point of view, authoritarianism is necessity for the president, destiny for the Republican Party.
But recent reports that Russian interests may have funneled millions of dollars to the National Rifle Association’s effort to campaign for Donald Trump raise the possibility that the GOP’s assistance in squashing the Russia investigation may be more directly self-serving than protecting a president who embodies strongman tendencies with which they agree. A few words about the NRA-Russia connection first, though: according to the McClatchy news service article linked to above, “The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency.” The NRA apparently spent $30 million to support Trump in 2016, which is three times as much as the organization spent supporting Mitt Romney is 2012. Moreover, the NRA says it spent $55 million on the 2016 elections — but there are reports that this spending may have been closer to $70 million. It’s also important to note that, as Talking Points Memo outlines, ties between the NRA and Russian interests go back years, beyond these recent financial allegations.
If this funding story turns out to be true, the narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 election immediately broadens from whether the Trump campaign received support, to whether the GOP as a whole was assisted by Russian intervention. Even if party leaders merely suspect this to be the case, the idea that Republican senators and representatives may have benefitted from Russian cash is a storyline that should rightly terrify them, and that they’d seek to discredit by smearing or shutting down the more-prominent Mueller investigation.
This Vox article also notes the possibility that the NRA may not have been the only conservative organization to have been infiltrated by Russian interests. I would note, though, that “infiltration” is arguably not the proper way to look at the relationship between an organization like the NRA and Russian agents. Not just guns rights advocates, but conservative religious figures and white nationalists, look to Russia and see not an authoritarian monstrosity, but a model of government, pseudo-Christianity, and values worthy of emulation and respect. I suspect the bigger, more unsettling story is less about innocent groups being co-opted or suborned, but about such groups forming de facto alliances with right-wing organizations abroad.
We still don’t have a lot of information about the full extent of the NRA funding allegations — yet there is already solid reporting in the public record of ties between the NRA and unseemly Russian figures with links both to organized crime and the Kremlin. It is not too soon to start publicizing these facts: seldom has there been an organization so vicious, repellent, and deserving of being called out for its connections to Russian authoritarians who have no love for our country. If the NRA has been stupid enough to cultivate ties with such people, it should be made to pay the price in reputation, influence, and political power.
