It's hard to overestimate the contribution America's media pundits made to helping Russia damage Hillary Clinton in 2016, and it seems some of the worst offenders are now starting to have second thoughts after finding out this week that they squarely fell into the useful idiot category over the last two years or so. Our first contestant: Politico's Blake Hounshell.
When I wrote, back in February, that I was skeptical that President Donald Trump would ever be proved to have secretly colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election in his favor, I mistyped.
What I meant to write was that I wasn’t skeptical.
Last week’s events have nullified my previous skepticism. To recap: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein revealed indictments against 12 Russians for the hacks of the Democratic National Committee, and we learned that Russian hackers went after Hillary Clinton’s private office for the first time on the very day Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” At the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump attacked a close European ally—Germany—and generally questioned the value of the alliance. Next, he visited the United Kingdom and trashed Prime Minister Theresa May. Then, in Helsinki, he met with Vladimir Putin privately for two hours, with no U.S. officials present other than a translator. After this suspicious meeting, he sang the Russian strongman’s praises at a news conference at which he said he viewed Putin’s denials on a par with the unanimous and unchallenged conclusions of America’s intelligence agencies.
With every other world leader, the physically imposing Trump attempts to dominate—witness his alpha-male handshakes with French President Emanuel Macron or his flamboyant man-spreading next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yet with the diminutive Putin—who is maybe 5 feet, 6 inches tall—he’s oddly submissive. During the public portion of their encounter, Trump was slumping in his chair, as if defeated. Why? Why did he insist on a one-on-one meeting with Putin in the first place?
Because Trump respects and wants what Putin has: a President-for-Life gig where he can do whatever, and arguably Putin is the wealthiest person on the planet if you start counting up the assets he truly controls. The guy is worth maybe $200 billion, easily doubling what Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk have. Trump wants that so badly that he can taste it, and this is a man whose taste buds are drowning in burnt steaks with ketchup. Putin's enormous wealth is one of the worst-kept secrets on Earth, and Trump wants that for himself.
What about my argument that Trump was constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret? That, too, is no longer operative. Since I first wrote, we’ve learned that Trump—a skinflint who once had his own charity pay a $7 fee to register his son for the Boy Scouts—was willing to shell out $130,000 of his own money to hush up a fling with a porn actress, Stormy Daniels. And he still hasn’t copped to sleeping with her, despite the discovery of their nondisclosure agreement and contemporaneous evidence that the affair really happened. None of this leaked out until well after the election, proving that Trump is indeed capable of keeping his yap shut when he wants. Not convinced? How about the fact that Brett Kavanaugh’s name didn’t leak out as Trump’s latest Supreme Court pick until minutes before the announcement?
Politically speaking, Trump’s devotion to his pro-Putin line doesn’t make sense. Yes, the GOP base is impressionable, and perhaps Republican voters would accept it if Trump came out and said, “You bet, Russia helped get me elected, and wasn’t that a good thing? We couldn’t let Crooked Hillary win!” But nobody would say his odd solicitousness toward the Kremlin leader is a political winner, and it certainly causes an unnecessary amount of friction with Republicans in Congress. He’s kept it up at great political cost to himself, and that suggest either that he is possessed by an anomalous level of conviction on this one issue, despite his extraordinary malleability on everything else—or that he’s beholden to Putin in some way.
Ahh, but Trump's friendship with Vladimir very much is a political winner, especially among the white supremacist set that admires Russian "purity". They want Trump to have what Putin has too, because it would mean that Trump would be a fascist with the power to make their fever dreams of a "white ethno-state" very much a reality. This is Trump's base, and they love him for it, and as for the rest of Trump's voters, well it's not a dealbreaker for them, now is it?
As I keep saying, Republicans overwhelmingly approve of Putin and Trump's relationship with him. And yes, they will absolutely start saying "Well if the Russians helped us beat that Hillary bitch, then I'm all for it to continue."
This is exactly what's happening, guys. There's some pushback now, but once it becomes clear that Republicans want to win in 2018 by any means necessary, then they'll take the help. Also, the pushback has been symbolic and meaningless.
Besides, the zeitgeist has moved on from kids in cages and migrant families in detention camps, remember? Putin is already helping the GOP in 2018.
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