The biggest news on the Trump-Russia front today, in this week of blockbuster news, is a New York Times piece detailing the briefing Donald Trump received from national security officials two weeks before his inauguration: a briefing in which the president-elect was provided with explicit evidence that Vladimir Putin had directed Russian assets to interfere with the 2016 election. I suspect that this is a deep-burrowing bombshell that will continue to reverberate in the weeks ahead, as it builds on an awareness that began to reach a point of critical mass with the Helsinki Surrender Summit: that aside from questions of whether Donald Trump actively colluded with the Russians to sabotage the 2016 election, since that time he has effectively acted to prevent the American people from understanding the scope of Russian perfidy. He has, in other words, taken the side of Russia against the interests of the United States. Whether you call it collusion or treason, it is undeniably a profound and disqualifying betrayal of this country.
Up to this last week, Donald Trump’s strategy has been to combine two critical questions into one, and to answer them with a resounding “no”: Did the Russians conducted cyberwarfare against the United States to assist in Trump’s election, and did Trump and/or his campaign collude with such an effort? For reasons that remain obscure even as explanatory theories abound, the president has insisted that neither happened, even as information providing an irrefutable “yes” to the first question has cascaded into public view for going on two years. Whatever his reasoning, we can easily see how denying Russian interference takes care of the question of collusion: without interference, there could be no possibility of Trump working with the Russians to interfere.
But in hewing so vehemently to his denial of Russian interference, Donald Trump has effectively opened himself up to a devastating second front on the collusion question: that his policy of denying the fact of Russian interference would at some point be recognized as itself a form of collusion, regardless of whether he colluded with the Russians during the election, once the gap between his denials and reality became wide enough. The extremity of his denials reached chasm dimensions when he repeated them standing next to the president of the country that had attacked the United States. And now, to read that Trump has known for a year and a half that the U.S. government had proof not only of Russian interference, but of Putin’s imprimatur on the interference, only heightens the impression that the president has, at least since the election, been actively protecting Russia from the consequences of its actions.
We have also arrived at the point where we can no longer avoid the fact that this has never just been a Trump-Russia story, but a Republican Party-Russia story as well. As Greg Sargent at The Washington Post explains, the GOP strategy all along has been to provide Donald Trump a specious “escape hatch” via a corrupt bargain: if he would just admit that Russia interfered with the election and contribute to the impression of a “tough-on-Russia” GOP consensus, then Republicans in Congress would work to defend him on the collusion front by delegitimizing Robert Mueller’s investigation. Sargent goes on to explain the implications of the New York Times story for this arrangement:
But the new revelations from the Times fundamentally change the situation. The question is no longer: Why won’t Trump accept the intelligence services’ verdict on what happened, and act accordingly? That question can be easily answered, by, say, the idea that Trump’s ego won’t let him publicly admit to anything that diminishes the greatness of his victory. But the question now is a lot harder: Why did Trump continue actively trying to deceive America into believing that Russian sabotage didn’t happen at all, after having been comprehensively briefed to a previously unknown extent on Putin’s direct involvement in that sabotage effort?
But the problem isn’t limited to the GOP’s preferred damage control strategy on the Trump-Russia front being blown up. Public awareness that Trump appears to have been colluding with Russia since the election casts a damning light on GOP efforts to protect Trump from the Mueller investigation, since it essentially makes the Republican Party, at a minimum, unwitting accessories to Trump’s collusion.
We can’t lose sight of the basic fact that a horrifying crime was perpetrated against American democracy, and that Donald Trump has worked over the last year to obscure both the basic existence of this crime and our country’s ability to answer legitimate questions about his possible involvement in it. (The president’s efforts on this front have included, but are not limited to, the following: firing the head of the FBI; attacking journalists as “the enemy of the people”; attacking Democratic politicians who insisted on learning the truth; and attacking U.S. national security agencies). In providing cover for the president, the GOP has made itself party to actions that strike at the heart of this country’s essence: self-determination and a government that serves the people’s interests.
Now is the time for a relentless dismantling of the increasingly desperate arguments being made by the president and the GOP. From Donald Trump tweeting that we risk nuclear war with Russia if we continue to accuse it of election interference, to the GOP’s discredited argument that Donald Trump did not collude but is merely afraid of exposing his election as illegitimate, distractions need to be swatted down and focus kept on big questions like these: why does Donald Trump continue to provide cover for Russian crimes against America, and why is it so hard for the GOP to take America’s side?
