The cascade of offenses against our democracy and our collective security can feel overwhelming, but the stories last week about Russian efforts to double down on their efforts in 2016 and interfere in the 2020 election should be getting every American’s attention. This is not simply because our leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, have a responsibility to put a stop to this attack, but because the president is already lying about the Russian offensive, just as he did in the wake of Russia’s 2016 sabotage.
It has gone on for so long that it can be hard to see the situation with fresh eyes, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop trying. When the U.S. intelligence community warns that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election to support him, and Donald Trump denies this, everyone who believes in our right to choose the leaders we want should understand that the president is simply lying. He has no sources of information apart from our national intelligence agencies. If he did, he would make them known, to strengthen his case, but he does not. Beyond this, the president’s indifference to Russian interference, even for the moment granting him his belief that it’s not actually for his benefit, in itself is a failure to protect the U.S. from a foreign attack.
The New York Times reports that the president was angered by the fact that Democrats were briefed on the intelligence community’s assessment of the interference intended to benefit him, but you will search in vain for reports of his similar anger at the Russians for attempting to undermine U.S. elections in the first place. The president apparently is upset that the Democrats have been told this information because he worries they will use it against him for partisan advantage. This again betrays the president’s complete lack of understanding of what it means to actually be an American president, not just a Republican one. An American president would find Russian support of his presidency obscene and in need of rebuffing; this president, though, prefers to simply persuade the American people that no such support exists, and to do nothing about receiving its benefits. In furtherance of this strategy, he has already dismissed the acting director of intelligence he holds responsible for publicizing Russia’s support of his campaign, and has replaced him with a lackey who has apparently been charged with defending the president’s political interests over U.S. national security: a disturbing turn toward converting the U.S. intelligence apparatus into a partisan weapon.
Not only has the president lied about what he knows regarding Russia’s ongoing campaign to re-elect him, he claims that Russia actually wants Bernie Sanders to be president. Yet it has also been reported that the Russians are interfering in the Democratic primary and appear to support the Sanders’ candidacy: information which Donald Trump has clearly been briefed on. This Democratic Party effort may indeed be part of Russia’s attempt to undermine our faith in our electoral system more generally, but it is clearly not at odds with Russia’s effort to re-elect Trump, as they would not be alone in viewing Sanders as a weak candidate against him. But rather than act to foil and deter Russia’s interference in our elections, including the Democratic primary, Trump is already using the sabotage campaign to his personal advantage: he tells us it is indeed ongoing, takes no responsibility to stop it, and uses it as a partisan weapon to slander Sanders. I don’t see how you can look at these facts and not conclude that the president is effectively colluding with the Russian scheme against our election on his behalf, by choosing to distort the ends of the Russian interference in the Democratic primary rather than call it out as a hostile act against the United States that he has a responsibility to stop. In a similar vein, his denial of the Russian efforts on his behalf — again, based on absolutely no evidence — mean that he is effectively colluding with their effort on behalf of him.
The true horror and absurdity of this moment come into full focus when we recall the events of the past four years, with which this latest information provides a dark continuity. The president is doing the same thing he did in the 2016 election and its aftermath, when he reaped the benefits of Russian electoral interference while denying that such interference existed (and this is setting aside the extensive evidence of explicit collusion between his campaign and the Russian government). And since that election, we’ve witnessed a president curiously obsequious to Vladimir Putin, mysteriously subordinating vital aspects of American foreign policy to Russian interests.
As in the past, the president lies about Russia’s role with support from the broader GOP. Tellingly, the evidence Republican officials cite of Trump’s allegedly tough stance against Moscow is laughable, only serving to disprove their point. Defending Trump, Representative Chris Stewart spoke of how the president has strengthened NATO and supplied anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. For anyone to believe that Trump has been strengthening NATO, and not trying to tear it down since the day he took office, is too absurd to contemplate. And as for his commitment to defending Ukraine? I seem to recall an impeachment about how he tried to extort that country, withholding vital military aid even while Ukrainian soldiers were dying in their conflict with Russia and Russia-backed separatists.
So as Republican elected officials sign on to Trump’s lies about Russia’s role, the fact that the president is now purging the intelligence community to ensure that further information about Russia’s activities on his behalf is not made public or known to Democrats is not simply chilling, but a fact that in itself needs to be called to account beyond the fact of Russia’s attack on our elections. In doing so, the president is seeking to formalize his own lies about Russia’s role, again abetting that attack rather than defending America against it.
At this point, the House Democrats’ game plan for running the 2020 election by highlighting health care, jobs, and corruption seems to have run into the wood chipper of the hard facts of the president’s betrayal of this country. When America is attacked, the president’s job as commander in chief is to defend it, not to give the attackers a pass because he thinks they’re on his side. For the Democrats to ignore the overriding primacy of protecting our elections is to exist in a sort of fantasyland. A foreign campaign to rig the 2020 election, supported by the president, is not something that they can simply ignore, as if ignoring it will somehow make it go away or allow them to set the agenda of the 2020 election. They act as if they can’t do anything about it, yet Trump clearly fears exposure — that’s why he keeps lying about what Russia is doing, even as he seeks to benefit from it.
This isn’t to say that the Democrats can’t or shouldn’t also advocate for their positive agenda. Indeed, it’s crazy to me how they don’t see how the president’s profound abdication of duty on this central issue — defending our elections — completely dovetails with the issues they say they want to run on. If the president can’t be trusted to defend our elections, how can he be trusted to defend people’s health care or jobs? And isn’t enabling and embracing a foreign attack based on his selfish personal interest the ultimate example of corruption?
Indeed, we are at our current perilous point in part because the Democrats have held back in two major respects. First, they have refrained from the necessary demonization and denunciations of Russia that Putin’s offenses demand. Election sabotage is not something we just have to get used to; it’s something we have to put an end to. Crush Russian with economic sanctions; arm their enemies; arrest any Russians involved with the election tampering who make the mistake of leaving Russian territory. And last but not least, enact a long-term strategy that undermines Putin’s authoritarian state and gives the Russian people a shot at life in a democracy.
Given that the Russians are meddling in the Democratic primaries on Bernie Sanders’ behalf, the Democrats also have no political choice but to emphasize that they view Russia as engaged in an attack on the U.S. that must be repelled and defeated. Otherwise, we will surely see Donald Trump flip the script, and accuse Bernie of being the one who is colluding with the Russians, while asserting that he’s the true defender of America (in fact, in the few hours since I started writing this article, I now see that Trump’s National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, is also using the reports of Russia’s interference on Bernie Sanders’ behalf as demonstrating Sanders’ sympathy for Russia, leading me to believe we’ll be seeing much more of this tactic. In light of this, Sanders would be well advised to take the advice of former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, who writes today that “If Bernie is the nominee, he needs to DEMAND, vocally and repeatedly, that the IC thoroughly investigate all Russian efforts to boost his campaign, provide him with regular updates, and for Trump to immediately take steps to ensure election security.” Rangappa argues that this is the right thing to do, forms a sharp contrast with the president’s behavior, and is a prophylactic against the slurs that will come from the Trump campaign). Similarly, I don’t see how any Democratic presidential candidate can be considered credible without a concrete plan to end Russian election interference once and for all. This simply can’t be permitted to go on. It may not be war in the classic sense of a violent conflict, but the use of sophisticated misinformation efforts to hack our democracy is nonetheless an attack on our political system and our society.
Second, despite having impeached Trump for abuse of power, Democrats have shied away from the assertion that is staring us in the face: that this president has actively betrayed the United States by making himself party to an attack by a hostile foreign power. I understand the impulse to avoid Trump-like incendiary language and a general desire to avoid exacerbating the incivility that he has fueled; yet our inability to call something by its right name can be crippling, and that increasingly feels like the case regarding Trump’s unwillingness to defend the United States against foreign attack.