Greg Sargent at The Washington Post has a short piece up today that makes a couple key points about the Russia-Trump relationship that are both important in themselves and hint at a larger development in this overall story. Sargent argues that no matter whether or not collusion existed between the Trump campaign and Russia, Donald Trump’s behavior at the Helsinki meeting constitutes a de facto rewarding of Vladimir Putin for Russia’s role in helping Trump’s candidacy. Trump accomplished this both by choosing not to press the matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election in any meaningful way, and by making statements and issuing tweets that absolve the Russians of any blame.
But Sargent also makes a narrower point that may be the fulcrum of the case to be made about Donald Trump’s failure to defend the United States against foreign attack:
He’s also giving a gift to Putin, by signaling that he will continue to do all he can to delegitimize efforts to establish the full truth about Russian interference, which in turn telegraphs that Russia can continue such efforts in the future (which U.S. intelligence officials have warned will happen in the 2018 elections). In a sense, by doing this, Trump is colluding with such efforts right now.
Denying the reality of past Russian interference means that President Trump has made himself complicit with ongoing and future Russian sabotage against the United States. Sargent hedges the phrasing by saying “in a sense” Trump is colluding with Russia, but whatever term one chooses to use, the underlying reality is that Donald Trump is enabling the actions of a hostile power against the United States in the present day [UPDATE: Sargent has a follow-up tweet that removes any doubt that he's calling out Trump's behavior as collusion]. According to the president’s own director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, the scope of Russian sabotage goes well past election interference to clear evidence that it’s currently attacking U.S. digital infrastructure.
Finally — as you look at Sargent’s narrower point about collusion and his larger point that the Helsinki meeting constituted payback for Russia’s assistance with Trump’s election, we can make a broader observation that’s been increasingly reflected in coverage of the Trump-Russia story: that no matter what the full story of the connections between Trump and Russia may turn out to be, we are at a point where Trump’s behavior, both toward Russia and toward allegations of Russian attacks on the United States, simply cannot be explained as reasonable or innocent behavior by a president of the United States.
Trump would deny the existence of any context for his behavior toward Russia beyond the idea that the relationship with the United States is unnecessarily bad, that this is a crisis, and that he alone can resolve it. Of course, the larger context for the Helsinki meeting is, first, that Russia has acted in ways deeply hostile to the United States and its interests in recent years; and second, that Trump has expended great efforts throughout his presidency, and glaringly in the week prior to the meeting, attacking both NATO and the European Union, the dissolution of both being a primary Russian goal. In other words, everywhere you look into Trump’s behavior towards long-time U.S. interests, you find rhetoric and actions that make no sense in terms of American power or values, and complete sense in terms of What Would Russia Do? Simply put, we now have a full year and a half of Trump’s presidential malfeasance in the matter of Russia by which to judge him, and it is looking very damning indeed.
