Russiagate was real enough
The most inflammatory accusations might not have panned out, but what we know about Trump and Russia is still shocking.
A thought experiment: imagine if OJ Simpson had been accused of murdering five people, but it turned out he’d only been falsely accused and framed by the LAPD because reasons for murder killed two people. And then OJ’s supporters declared, “the lamestream media just exaggerated this whole thing from the start” and got #OJMurderHoax trending on Twitter, and Naked Gun IV: The Rise of Nordberg got green-lighted.
Oh, and he also murdered another person and bragged about it on Twitter, but everyone just kind of moved on because that’s old news now.
That’s kind of how I felt when I saw that Donald Trump, who famously asked Russia to release information about one of his political opponents, once again asked Russia to release information about one of his political opponents:
Amid widespread criticism of his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, former President Donald Trump publicly called on Putin on Tuesday to release any dirt he might have on Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
Trump, in an interview with Just the News, seized on an unsubstantiated claim about Biden’s obtaining a hefty payment from Elena Baturina, the former wife of the late former mayor of Moscow, and asked Putin to provide details.
“She gave him $3.5 million, so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it,” Trump said. “I think we should know that answer.”
Trump was referring to information from a partisan Senate report published just weeks before the 2020 election, which also focused on Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Hunter Biden’s legal team told NBC News in 2020 that Biden had “no interest” in that firm that received the money, so “the claim he was paid $3.5 million was false.”
[…]
Trump's remarks in Tuesday's interview come shortly after GOP lawmakers urged President Biden to more forcefully punish Putin for waging war on Ukraine, only to have Trump praise Putin.
Trump trying to kiss Vladmir Putin’s ass before 2022 was bad enough. Trump appealing to him now, at a time when headlines like this are prevalent, is obscene.
Donald Trump is the kind of man who would have publicly appealed for dirt on FDR from Nazi Germany in mid-1941. Or even after 1941.
When the Mueller report came out in 2019, the general consensus in MAGA-world was that it amounted to a complete exoneration, which it would have been so deemed even had Muller wrote “the pee tape is totally real, and in fact we’ve put it on YouTube at this link if you’ve got a strong stomach.” But even those of us who hoped Mueller would deliver the magic bullet that took down Trump for good were disappointed.
In fact, the stuff Mueller did uncover about Trump and Russia, even if it might not have been enough for criminal charges, is still really, really freaking bad:
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Donald Trump and Russia establishes a damning series of facts about the Trump campaign’s connections to the Kremlin.
We learned that two Trump campaign officials, campaign manager Paul Manafort and Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates, were regularly providing polling information to a Russian national whom Gates believed to be a “spy.”
We learned that, after Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails, he privately ordered future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to find them. Flynn reached out to a man named Peter Smith who (apparently falsely) told a number of people that he was in contact with Russian agents.
We learned that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos attempted to arrange meetings between Trump and Putin, and that Trump personally approved Papadopoulos’s work on this front.
The report is very clear that Mueller’s investigation did not establish that the Trump campaign criminally conspired on illegal Russian election interference, or that it coordinated with Russia through either an active or tacit agreement.
But the report, combined with other publicly known facts — that Donald Trump Jr. arranged a meeting with the express purpose of obtaining Russian “dirt” on Clinton, and that Papadopoulos was offered similar dirt from a Russian agent, among others — paints a damning picture of the campaign. It was both actively seeking to cultivate a relationship with the Russian government and willing to work with it to acquire damaging information about its political opponents. That willingness included explicitly sharing information with or soliciting information from Russian operatives.
As the report takes pains to point out, “collusion” has no legal definition and is not a federal crime. So while the report did not establish conspiracy or coordination, it does not make a determination on “collusion” — and in fact, it strongly suggests that there was at least an attempt to collude by Trump’s campaign and agents of the Russian government.
The fact that it did not rise to the level of criminal activity does not mean it was not a serious breach of trust and a damning indictment of the president’s commitment to the health of the American legal and political system. The section of the report focusing on Russian interference in the election is not an exoneration of Trump’s innocence. It’s a devastating portrayal of his approach to politics.
The OJ jurors may have been obligated to find Simpson guilty only if it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us couldn’t draw our own conclusions. And it’s the same thing with Trump and the Russians. Never mind what was uncovered by investigators and journalists: what Trump himself has said and done in public should be disqualifying.
How has he been allowed to get away with it? I agree that some media outlets, who often got way out over their skis and sometimes blatantly put their thumbs on the scale, deserve at least some blame. You can only cry “pee tape!” so many times before people stop believing it.1
But there’s also the firehose of falsehood meant not so much to get people believing everything Trump says but to at least get them questioning pretty much everything they see, hear and read. And as political partisanship curdles into something more like sectarianism, Republicans are more likely to defend “their guy,” regardless of the evidence, because their affiliation is such a part of their identity.2
And maybe a disturbing number of people, even now, just don’t mind their candidate being in league with Putin because hatred of the other side is what matters the most.
Heck, this isn’t just an American thing. Look at the current polling for the impending French Presidential election:
Macron’s post-February 24 bump in the polls is starting to fade, and Marine Le Pen - whose party took out loans from Russian oligarchs - has some momentum. Combine her support with that of Melenchon and Zemmour, who are pro-Russia or at least anti-anti-Russia, and you have over 45% of the French electorate backing Putin-friendly extremist candidates in the first round.
Thankfully, even if all of these people support whichever wingnut makes it to the runoff, it won’t be enough to unseat Macron. But when that many people are backing such candidates, your democracy has a serious problem - just as it does when over 74 million people chose four more years of Trump, even if that was drowned out by 81 million opposed.
I still believe it. That and “Jar Jar Binks was originally meant to be a Sith Lord” are the conspiracy theories I will defend until my dying breath.
Democrats aren’t nearly so far gone yet, but keep an eye on this creep.
Sectarian politics...hadn't thought of it quite like that, but I think you're right about that being what the politics in the U.S. are heading toward, if they're not there already. For how much of what's happening is actually about what we've normally thought of as political goals and policies, and how much is about political identity? One party pretty much wants to govern, but the other only wishes to rule, having no plan for governing beyond "owning" a certain group of folks and pretty much just doing as it pleases otherwise. There are no doubt folks cut from that same bolt of cloth on the other side of the divide, but, at least for now, they seem to be much fewer in numbers and influence on their party. But as with anything else, that can always change.