In a recent New York Magazine piece, Jonathan Chait assembles evidence for the most extreme and disastrous possibility lurking in the Trump-Russia story: that Donald Trump has been under the influence of Soviet and Russian intelligence for the last 30 years. As the subtitle of the story puts it, it’s “a plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion.”
This article provides three great services. First, it delivers one of the most concise and comprehensive summaries of the Trump-Russia connections that I've found. Second, it opens the door on a possibility that, as I’ll discuss below, is far more possible than most people believe. And third, it effectively makes the argument that even if the most extreme possibility turns out not to be true, the Russian effort to influence the election and Donald Trump has been met with a chilling and damning receptivity by the president.
Chait’s article also works as a remedy to the issue I discussed yesterday: the general lack of a commonly-understood and -propagated narrative explaining the already-damning state of knowledge around the Trump-Russia scandal. Chait identifies this problem right off the bat, and homes in on an obstacle to constructing such a narrative: that attempts to grapple with and fit together the known facts have tended to exclude the darkest possibilities about Trump’s ties to Russia. The implication is that this has led certain facts to be ignored or downplayed, and contributed to the difficulty in arriving at a coherent explanation of the reality of the situation.
One great strength is that the piece clearly presents its evidence as supporting a theory about Trump’s corruption, not the final truth of his long-time subordination to Russian interests. It doesn’t matter to our current predicament whether Donald Trump has been subject to Russian influence and blackmail for 30 years or 3 years; either way, it’s a disaster for our country, and the political scandal of the century. What struck me, though, was that in assembling the evidence for long-term ties, Chait paints a deeply disturbing picture regardless of the degree of Donald Trump’s complicity. This is a situation where if even a fraction of the possibilites are true — and it’s pretty clear at this point that things like Donald Trump’s knowledge that he was effectively laundering dirty Russian money through his real estate business and willingness to accept Russian help during the campaign are irrefutable — then he is too compromised to serve as our chief executive. Even if the overall theory turns out not to hold water, it does, as Chait implies at the outset, clarify our ability to better understand and see connections between the known facts.
I want to focus on a few particular points that drew my attention. First, Chait draws a tantalizing line between Trump’s initial political utterances on the national stage and a visit he made to Moscow in 1987. It’s not simply that 1987 was the year he signaled political aspirations, but the form they took: a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that attacked Japan for relying on the U.S. for its defense. Sound familiar? Chait goes on to note that Trump’s ads “avoided the question of whom the U.S. was protecting those countries from.” Breaking up American alliances has been a perennial goal of both the Soviet Union and Russia from that time to the present; the continuity between Trump’s apparent blindness to any legitimate U.S. interest in protecting other countries as a national security matter, and turning a blind eye to the threat posed by the USSR or Russia, strikes me as remarkable.
A related point also leaps out at me — I’ve seen it discussed before, but Donald Trump’s enormous vulnerability to blackmail by Russian intelligence emerges as a glaring possibility. It’s a general technique employed by the Russians, and the possibility that it’s being used against Trump has been obscured by people thinking of blackmail as involving something extremely embarrassing, such as the activities contained in the alleged pee tape. Though far less salacious, Trump’s business dealings with Russian interests over the last decade and a half likely contain enough shadiness and outright illegality to provide leverage to anyone willing to use it; and as Chait’s article makes clear, it would have been a no-brainer for Russian intelligence to gather such useful materials.
The article also clarifies the sinister and damning role of Paul Manafort’s connection to the Trump campaign. For me, this was a case of having read and heard so much about Manafort that I had begun to miss the forest for the trees. Here, Chait lays out not only Manafort’s clear connections to oligarchs closely tied to Putin (and thus his de facto service to Vladimir Putin himself) but his work as a political consultant in Ukraine in a campaign that strongly echoes what we saw in the U.S. in 2016. Chait writes:
This much was clear in March 2016: The person who managed the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine was now also managing the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in the United States. And Trump’s campaign certainly looked like the same play Putin had run many times before: Trump inflamed internal ethnic division, assailed the corruption of the elite, attacked Western allies while calling for cooperation with Russia, and sowed distrust in the fairness of the vote count.
While it’s true that a man as immoral and anti-democratic as Trump could have been open to such a playbook from multiple sources, the role of Manafort in his campaign, along with the bounty of other Russian contacts, casts a harsh light on what I had generally assumed was the home-grown nasty nativism of his 2016 campaign.
It’s not central to his article, but Chait makes an observation near the end that captures something that hasn’t gotten enough attention: the fact that Trump has pretty much stopped acting like the Russia investigation will find him innocent. “He acts like a man with a great deal to hide,” writes Chait, and adds, “Trump’s behavior toward Russia looks nothing like that of a leader of a country it attacked and exactly like that of an accessory after the fact.” Critically, Chait pairs this with the observation that Trump continually seeks to please Putin in ways that keep alive suspicion that Trump is somehow under Putin’s thumb. This article was published before the Helsinki summit, but the horrifying press conference in which Trump cleared Russia of blame for election interference may be the most striking example to date of this behavior. There is an almost uncanny, compulsive quality to Trump’s spouting of pro-Russian positions that only strengthens suspicions of something along the lines of blackmail.
As I’ve weighed the persuasiveness of the case Chait makes, I’ve begun to think there’s a sort of all-or-nothing quality to the general question of Donald Trump’s collusion with Russian interests in the 2016 election. The more evidence there is that Donald Trump has benefitted from Russian influence and cash — whether it be dirty money that helped fund his real estate ventures or the hacking of Democratic email accounts that embarrassed the Clinton campaign — the more persuasive the arguments that he did so knowingly, because at a basic level the ignorance we are to assume on his part increasingly begins to defy belief. Similarly, the more evidence there is that he knowingly colluded with Russian interests in the present and recent past, the more persuasive are arguments that this is a long- term arrangement with the Russian government. This latter point is given particular strength by the fact that we are talking about not just any old criminality, but a criminality that is so heinous — treasonous behavior — that it seems obvious that anyone who would be willing to engage in it now would also be the type of person to have engaged in it years ago. The nature of the crime points to a debased character that did not come into existence overnight, but that is a long-standing reality. After all we have collectively observed of Donald Trump's character over the years, can we really say that treason would be a bridge too far for him?
