The urgency of the upcoming election, the continued daily political maelstrom, and the reality that the fight for American democracy will remain fraught and vicious even should there be a Democratic sweep in November have made it hard to imagine ever having time to assess the mayhem and conflict of the past four years. But an article from Mother Jones’ David Corn has re-focused me on a political thread whose consequence has seemed as small as its coverage has been large: Russia’s efforts to subvert the 2016 election and its ongoing attempt at a repeat in 2020, all with the complicity if not outright assistance of Donald Trump.
Corn discusses an interview with former Trump national security advisor H.R. McMaster two weeks ago that would have caused a potentially presidency-ending crisis in earlier times; in particular, Corn points to McMaster’s remarks that the president currently “is aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to interfere in the 2020 election. Corn asserts that this is indistinguishable from McMaster stating that the president is “acting like a traitor,” which I think is a fair assessment. After all, a president who denies the existence of a foreign attack, fires national security officials who seek to highlight it, and works to keep the public in the dark about such an attack is committing treason under any reasonable meaning of the word. And as Corn goes on to describe, the president’s effort has been abetted by Republican senators, who, despite publishing a report acknowledging current Russian subversion efforts, have failed to hold a single hearing on the matter.
This is not simply a case of Democrats failing to make any effort to hold Trump accountable for treasonous behavior. Corn notes efforts by elected officials like Connecticut Senator Phil Murphy and Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden to publicize the Russian campaign and the Trump administration’s efforts to ignore it. Murphy has also asserted that U.S. intelligence agencies have essentially become part of Trump’s campaign by downplaying Russian efforts and overstating those by China and other countries.
But as Corn notes, shockers like McMaster’s interview comments are hardly front page news for major media outlets. Beyond this, the issue of Trump’s treasonous behavior is hardly a theme of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. At a basic level, it seems that the 2020 tale of Trump-Russia complicity has fallen into the same vortex of public disregard as the original 2016 story; Republicans don’t care about it, and Democratic rank-and-file aren’t calling on their elected representatives to press the matter.
The million dollar question is why this vortex exists in the first place. It’s reasonable to say that in 2020, the pandemic, economic meltdown, and escalating presidential insanity have inevitably pushed all other issues to the margins, even something as significant as treason. Yet simply reading David Corn’s article is enough to drive home the unforgivable betrayal by the president and the GOP in the matter of Russian’s attempts to subvert our elections. Why is this not a more prominent issue in American politics and in the presidential election? Or, as Corn writes, “As McMaster tells it, there is a turncoat in the White House. Other than the pandemic, what could be a greater threat to the United States and more deserving of continuous coverage and dread?”
There is indeed no greater threat; yet why this lack of “continuous coverage and dread” should exist emerges as a central mystery alongside Corn’s rhetorical question. Certainly there are many possible, overlapping explanations: the public’s perception that there was never any actual collusion between Russia and Trump in 2016, leading to the assumption that the current story is nothing to be overly concerned about; an accompanying exhaustion of belief that this issue matters following the seeming dud of the Mueller investigation and the failed impeachment effort on related grounds of treason; steadfast denials by the Trump White House that they have done anything wrong; and a general sense of abstraction in both the concept of treason and the extent to which Trump actually has benefitted from his malign behavior.
I think these all play some role — but a few more ominous ones have had more of an impact. The first is that not only the president, but the great majority of Republican senators and congresspeople, have made themselves party to denying Russian efforts to subvert American elections. Having made this fateful decision, they can hardly change to opposition or interrogation now. A second, equally ominous reason, flows from the first: many Republican politicians simply don’t see anything wrong with receiving foreign assistance, even from an obvious adversary like Russia, so long as it allows them to defeat an even worse enemy: Democrats (Adam Serwer has written persuasively on this angle). And a third factor works to validate the first two — most Republican voters apparently don’t care that their elected officials have made themselves complicit in the president’s aiding and abetting of Russian interference, so long as it helps them beat the Democratic Party.
The thing about treason is that it’s not important if individual citizens get particularly worked up about it. What matters much more is that there is a collective, societal understanding that treasonous behavior is so far beyond the pale that it is, at a minimum, politically disqualifying. In that sense, it doesn’t matter if it seems abstract, so long as it is also universally recognized as really bad. What is so horrifying about our situation is that a sufficient number of Americans, largely in the GOP, have decided that treason either doesn’t exist or doesn’t exist so long as it’s done to benefit their side, as to render questionable the basic concept of treason in the first place. And I wonder if a complementary mindset hasn’t taken hold of most Democrats: if the GOP is so bad, does treason even make them that much worse?
I think part of the reason the Democratic Party has never more aggressively made a bigger deal of the president’s treason, apart from the political reality that pressing the point won’t really change many votes, is out of a tacit recognition of this bitter divide over whether treason is even a thing, and the disturbing questions it raises about how divided the American people truly are. Pressing the point may lead to possibilities many don’t want to contemplate.
I think a variety of this recognition also guides the media to shy away from pressing the point even in the face of renewed complicity between Trump and the Russians. If it turns out that Trump is a traitor but only to half the country, that we can’t even agree that it’s bad for the president to look the other way when another country interferes in our elections, are we really a single nation any longer? Even the prospect of such a world could fill the steeliest journalist with a sense of nausea and fear.
The problem for all of us is that treason and foreign subversion are actually real and deadly serious matters. Russia isn’t interfering in America’s elections to make Trump stronger, but to make America weaker. This is why, despite the horror of the American divide over whether treason is even possible anymore, GOP complicity in the president’s conniving with Russia is indeed a big deal; is, in fact, behavior that should disqualify those complicit from any position of public trust. No matter how much they might think so, loyalty to the GOP is not the same as loyalty to the United States. Right now, Republican politicians may think there is safety in numbers, in acting as an unquestioning herd, but will this unity survive the coming years of revelations, and continued scrutiny of their actions? How well will it bear up as the party continues to lose elections and as its self-serving kneecapping of democracy alienates and enrages a larger and larger majority of Americans? At some point, a greater recognition of the party’s outright treason may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, shatters the party’s standing by providing the ultimate clarity as to whether the party can even be counted on to stand for America.
So while Democrats may feel a sense of futility right now, duty and political canniness both point in the same direction: never giving up on the cause of defending the U.S. from foreign depredations, and calling out a party that sells out the country in the hope of election victories it is no longer certain it can achieve on its own.