The criticism and perspective Mark Landler offers in this New York Times analysis of the Trump-Putin Helsinki conference put on full display the blinders too often encountered in mainstream press coverage of the ongoing Trump-Russia crisis. On the one hand, props to Landler for zeroing in some of the most outrageous moments of this deeply troubling tete-a-tete: he points out that Trump made clear he trusts Putin over the U.S. intelligence community, and that the president shockingly attacked the Justice Department and FBI from abroad.
But in describing Trump’s behavior as “rule-breaking,” Lander minimizes presidential rhetoric and policy that is more obviously described as “treasonous” or “anti-American.” To call the idea of siding with a country that attacked your own "breaking a norm" is true only in the most anodyne and misleading sense. To attack your own branch of government in favor of the statements of a murderous autocrat is so far past a simple description of “rule-breaking” as to be borderline nonsense.
Lander’s unwillingness to state the obvious emerges in what on its surface is a powerful observation — his linkage of Trump’s response to the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville last year and his behavior at the Helsinki summit. He writes:
In the fiery, disruptive, rules-breaking arc of Mr. Trump’s statecraft, the president’s remarks in Helsinki on Monday marked an entirely new milestone, the foreign policy equivalent of Charlottesville.
Just as Mr. Trump flouted the most deeply held traditions of the American presidency in equating the torch-wielding marchers and the leftist activists who fought them in Virginia last summer, he shredded all conventional notions of how a president should conduct himself abroad. Rather than defend America against those who would threaten it, he attacked his own citizens and institutions while hailing the leader of a hostile power.
As avid readers of The Hot Screen will be quick to point out, this website drew a similar parallel between Charlottesville and Trump’s behavior towards the world last month, in the wake of the catastrophic G-7 meeting. But the nature of the connection between those events, as between Charlottesville and Trump’s subservience to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, is not that both times Trump broke norms, but that he has thrown his lot in with enemies of American democracy. The problem with his reaction to Charlottesville wasn’t equating both sides, but that in doing so he lent legitimacy and, more subtly, presidential approbation, to a side that opposes the actual existence of the United States. He has now done the same thing with Russia, saying that the U.S. is equally to blame for problems in the U.S.-Russia relationship, and in doing so effectively endorsing a whole host of pernicious behavior by Russia against American interests.
Lander also badly misses the mark by suggesting that the connections between Trump’s behavior around Charlottesville and at the Helsinki summit are predominantly matters of temperament, encapsulated in some vague notion of norm-breaking and acting outside traditional presidential behavior. Rather, in both cases, the president has chosen to side with anti-democratic, anti-American forces who see violence as a legitimate form of conducting politics. Moreover, there are deep connections between the Christian-fascist ideology that Vladimir Putin has developed to maintain power, and the ideology of the white supremacists at Charlottesville. These connections are substantial, meaningful, and deeply disturbing to anyone who views the United States as a country that seeks to transcend divisions of race and religion. Indeed, you might say that they are the antithesis and the repudiation not only of our country’s highest aspirations, but of the actual common life that hundreds of millions of Americans make together every day.
