Trump Inaction on Russia: the Clincher
For a long time, some of us were willing to give Donald Trump the slim benefit of a doubt as to why he is actively trying to smother the three investigations (DOJ, House, and Senate) into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections. The benefit was to accept that Trump couldn’t acknowledge the charge against Russia because it would have cheapened his electoral victory.
As disgraceful as the vanity explanation was, at least it tended to let Trump off the hook for being played for a fool by Vladimir Putin, or, more seriously, being compromised by involvements with Russian oligarchs and business interests and/or the Kremlin itself.
Now that he has, grudgingly, admitted that Russia did meddle in the elections, he has taken to excoriating Obama for not doing more to stop it. That has been the pathetic extent of his leverage against Moscow.
!?!? We know that Trump is a whiner, but to whine about somebody doing you a favor just because you hadn’t earlier admitted it was a favor—how twisted can you get?
The only method that can be seen in this madness is that Trump is trying to divert attention away from his own negligence. That’s the standard interpretation, the default Trump M.O.—if something’s going wrong that’s your fault, blame somebody else.
But what’s happening now is more than the default Trumpian evasion of responsibility.
One has to wonder, if he wants to look tougher than Obama, if he wants to make it look as if he believes in deterring Russia from doing bad stuff, why he doesn’t take the most straightforward way out—implement the sanctions that Senate passed last July, 98 to 2! The path is wide open! Every Republican save Rand Paul voted for them! What could be easier?
Once you think about that for more than 15 seconds, you are left with the certainty that some or many Russians—the government, Putin, friends of Putin, oligarchs—have something on Trump that he is trying desperately to conceal.
We finally know, there is a there there.
(It’s so terrible that I am forced to use this cliche—but by golly, it’s fun!)
Worse than Trump: Supine Republicans keep mum. Act now, or don’t complain when thugs take over our government.
Trump has convicted himself. Now is the time, if there were ever a time, for Republican legislators to stand up and point out the obvious. They don’t! (As of this writing, 12:52 am, February 22, 2018. I will be gratified, and stunned, if they stand up tomorrow, but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.) Their failure to challenge Donald Trump poses more of a threat to democracy than does Trump himself. He can be seen as an aberration; but what is happening in the U.S. Congress is a steady slide into abject political irresponsibility that began before Trump was elected President. It’s no aberration, it’s a conscious descent into darkness. It’s a descent by people you might expect to know better. Trump has trouble distinguishing right from wrong, but the willingness of those who do know right from wrong to give him a pass on one wrong after another—that should most concern us.
Sometimes I think that alarms about threats to our republic are overstated: could it be that bad?
IT COULD. If you’re thinking of trying to help Democrats (or Independents of the Bernie Sanders persuasion) win in 2018, find a way to do it. Anything is better than nothing.
If you’re not thinking that, why not? To say you’re turned off by politics, by the divisiveness, by the fact that many Democrats are also compromised in some degree—that’s not, in this pivotal moment in history, an excuse to stand by and watch. There’s too much at stake.