“You don’t call the FBI.”
This was the answer given by the president of the United States to an interview question as to what a presidential candidate should do when offered derogatory intelligence on a rival politician by agents of a foreign power. When ABC’s George Stephanapoulos remarked that the FBI director says that calling the FBI is exactly what should happen, Trump removed all ambiguity as to his position, replying, “The FBI Director is wrong.”
This is an interview that everyone needs to read. After literally years of the president denying any collusion between his 2016 and Russia, in his remarks to Stephanapoulos he essentially said that he believes the activity he denies engaging in is actually legal and right, and something he would do. In one fell swoop, the president demolished any plausibility to his years-long defense, and this alone makes his recent words remarkable.
But more than that, what he said hits at multiple pillars of morality and patriotism simultaneously. This is the actual president of the United States, in unadorned language, saying that there’s no difference between opposition research and a hostile foreign power seeking to influence an election for its own purposes; that the Democrats are such a threat to the country that collusion with foreign spies is nothing in comparison; that there is no right and wrong, only a world divided between the powerful and the fucked-over; that it’s okay to betray your country if it helps you gain power.
This real-life nightmare scenario encompasses not only the president’s disqualifying sentiments, but the lack of outrage from the great majority of his party at what he has said. More than this, it encompasses a Democratic Party that, for reasons increasingly obscure, has consistently failed to attack the president for what he essentially is: a traitor who, as brutally summarized by David Corn at Mother Jones, encouraged election attacks by Russia, aided and abetted those attacks by denying their existence and failing to mobilize an adequate response or defense once he was elected president, and who now has invited wide-scale foreign meddling in the 2020 elections. As I’ve noted before, if the shoe were on the other foot, and a Democratic president had acted in this way, the Republicans would have been calling him a traitor from day 1, and for once their otherwise incendiary and over-the-top language would have been totally appropriate.
It’s not surprising today to see the president half-backtracking from his remarks, given the criticism they’ve received in the last few days, except there’s no reason to thinking he isn’t lying now. And although he now claims that of course he would notify the FBI should be notified if a hostile country were giving him dirt on a rival, he’d still look at the dirt. The idea that politicians should have a loyalty higher than to doing what it takes to win obviously eludes the man, even when he’s given the chance for a do-over. The president loves to talk about how you can’t have a country without borders, but equally true is that you can’t have a country when the president is willing to give foreign spies the keys to the White House.