As the sense builds that we may have reached some new tipping point in public awareness and political outrage over Donald Trump’s eagerness to absolve Russia from its crimes against American democracy, I’m feeling wary optimism but also a nagging fear that some dark lessons of the last year and a half have not yet been internalized by opponents of this presidency.
First, I’m thinking of the point Mother Jones reporter David Corn makes in “Donald Trump is Getting Away With the Biggest Scandal in American History,” where he flags the disturbing contrast between the president's easily digested take on the Russia story and the lack of a framing narrative on the part of his critics. While the president describes the scandal as a “witch hunt” with no basis in reality seemingly every day, those covering and talking about the reality of the story have tended to get bogged down in its vast amount of detail and manifold interconnecting threads. While Trump essentially repeats that there’s no scandal, no organized force is similarly hammering home the basic fact that Trump and his campaign’s complicity with Russian efforts to subvert the 2016 election are incontrovertible facts through which all further developments should be understood.
Corn’s critique encompasses the media, commentators, and the Democratic Party for falling down on this basic issue of framing — but from The Hot Screen’s perspective, it’s the Democrats who have had the primary responsibility to provide this, and who have badly failed thus far. Corn suggests that early on, the Democrats may have shied away from more aggressively discussing the Trump-Russia ties for fear of seeming like sore losers and due to an overall state of disorientation due to the election outcome. But it seems that the Democrats failed to grasp that Donald Trump’s continued and compulsive need to defend himself and attack all inquiries into what transpired in the course of the election opened a path for the Democrats to put the Russia scandal more firmly in front of the American people. And as Corn indicates, Democrats also failed to respond in an organized fashion and in a way that insisted on the basic facts of the situation. My sense is that this extreme caution was heightened by the existence of the Mueller probe. If the probe ended up exposing damning behavior on the part of Trump, they’d act then; in the meantime, seeming to politicize the investigation could potentially discredit the otherwise game-changing findings of the Mueller investigation.
The imbalance between the president’s ceaseless “Witch hunt!” rhetoric and a scattershot Trump-Russia narrative by Democrats tempers my hope that even Trump’s abject submission to Vladimir Putin at the “Putting the Hell Back in Helsinki” summit will persuade significant numbers of citizens that something was rotten in the state of Finland. My fears seem borne out even as I write this, as the president is claiming to have simply misspoken one line about the role of Russia in attacking the 2016 election; he is relying on confusion and evasion to save himself, just as he has over the last year and a half.
But I’ve got a more troubling concern about what effect Trump’s behavior in Helsinki will have on his presidency. Just as the fight against Trump has been hobbled by poor framing of the Russia scandal in general, discussions of how the scandal (and Trump’s other misbehavior) will be countered have largely rested on an unspoken and largely unquestioned premise that there is a breaking point at which the president will lose the support of his own party, and that this will lead to some sort of reckoning for the Trump administration. However, the GOP response to this abomination of a summit throws that premise into serious doubt. Although there have been a few strongly worded condemnations of the president’s Helsinki rhetoric, the House and Senate leadership has largely engaged in a two-step critique in which they assert the reality of the Russian attack, yet refuse to engage in any strengthened oversight or investigation of the president’s complicity with that attack. As this CNN piece puts it, “Republicans are grumbling but seem resigned to inaction.”
While incompetence is a possible explanation for this abdication, we already see some Republican politicians suggesting a bold alternative direction for the party: to fall back and accept the Russian interference, while presenting it as something that every country does to every other. On the maximalist end of things, Brian Beutler at Crooked.com has been pointing out how the Republicans have effectively been giving the Russians cover by attacking the Mueller probe, even when they’re well aware of the reality of Russian interference; in his latest post, Beutler suggests that many members of the GOP are in fact comfortable with Russian election interference, so long as it targets Democrats.
While this possibility is nauseating and shocking, here’s what I keep coming back to: in the absence of any substantial Republican pushback, let alone credible expressions of concern, regarding Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and clear subordination to Vladimir Putin, the possibility that this is indeed the GOP’s default position needs to be taken seriously. Of course it’s not something any Republican official would say out loud; but their steady defense of the president this last year and a half has had the effect not only of slowing efforts to determine the extent of the Trump-Russia ties, but the extent of known Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The question then becomes, has the GOP, without necessarily making a conscious decision to do so, wound up taking the de facto position that election interference isn’t so bad so long as it helps them? This argument gains more weight when you consider the role of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in vetoing President Obama’s effort in 2016 to issue a bipartisan statement on Russia's election sabotage. McConnell, as Machiavellian and soulless a figure as you will find in Washington, has made clear during his time in the Republican leadership that a quest for power trumps all other concerns: it is more important than justice, more important than the country’s economic health, more important than democracy itself. If the ends justify the means in all cases, then why would a hand-up from the Russians be any different for him?
But you don’t have to accept that the GOP tacitly or explicitly supports Russian interference on its behalf in order to see that the assumption that Republicans will at some point oppose Trump on the basis of revelations about his behavior is not a sound one. To the degree that the Democratic strategy for holding Donald Trump to account for his Russia ties rests on this assumption, then, it seems that the Democrats would be wise to choose a new strategy. Now, in their defense, many Democrats have been making the basic point that the solution to our mess is to elect as many Democrats as possible to the House and Senate in the 2018 elections. This argument makes sense in many ways, including the fact that it allows them to campaign on a positive platform of change alongside their critique of Donald Trump’s misdeeds. However, as I’ve argued before, it fails to relieve Democrats of their responsibility to do whatever it takes to hold Donald Trump to account in the present. And in a broader sense, they risk letting slip a once-in-a-generation opportunity to permanently identify the Democrats as the party that protects democracy, and the GOP as the party that doesn't give a flying f*** so long as they can gut health care and cut taxes for the rich.
