Since January 6 of this year, when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Agency chief Michael Rogers, and FBI Director James Comey paid a visit to President-elect Trump at New York City’s Trump Tower, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the United States intelligence community, elected officials, and even members of his own administration, to get Donald Trump to take the threat of Russian “active measures” seriously. And, in today’s Washington Post, there’s an incredibly detailed recounting of the whole thing, which, I think it’s fair to say, paints a fairly terrifying portrait of a President who, despite the copious amounts of evidence he’s been shown, refuses to accept even the possibility that the Russians could have sought to influence the result of the 2016 election. Here, to give you a sense of the article, is a short excerpt.
…Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.
The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government.
Rather than search for ways to deter Kremlin attacks or safeguard U.S. elections, Trump has waged his own campaign to discredit the case that Russia poses any threat and he has resisted or attempted to roll back efforts to hold Moscow to account.
His administration has moved to undo at least some of the sanctions the previous administration imposed on Russia for its election interference, exploring the return of two Russian compounds in the United States that President Barack Obama had seized — the measure that had most galled Moscow. Months later, when Congress moved to impose additional penalties on Moscow, Trump opposed the measures fiercely.
Trump has never convened a Cabinet-level meeting on Russian interference or what to do about it, administration officials said. Although the issue has been discussed at lower levels at the National Security Council, one former high-ranking Trump administration official said there is an unspoken understanding within the NSC that to raise the matter is to acknowledge its validity, which the president would see as an affront…
Oh, and here’s something else. Not only did our four highest ranking intelligence officers visit the President-elect on January 6, and warn him about the ongoing threat posted by Russia. They also told him that the CIA had “captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation” to hack the election. In other words, it wasn’t just a theory, even back on January 6. The four highest raining intelligence officers in the United State presented hard evidence to Donald Trump that the Russians had sought to sow discord in the United States, influence the outcome of the election, and erode trust our democratic institutions. And, in spite of this, Trump did nothing. And he’s continued to do nothing.
With all that we’ve learned since the election about the propaganda campaign designed to keep Hillary Clinton from the White House, the Russian troll farms, the hacking of the DNC, the Facebook ad buys, and all the rest of it, the President, in almost one year’s time, has yet to convene even a single meeting to address the very real threat of Russian active measures. In fact, according to senior White House officials, it’s gotten to the point where, in order to avoid Trump’s outbursts, even mentions of Russia are edited out of of his daily intelligence updates, which, by the way, are apparently delivered orally, as he prefers not to read. [From the Washington Post: “Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter. In other cases, Trump’s main briefer — a veteran CIA analyst — adjusts the order of his presentation and text, aiming to soften the impact.”] So, not only does our President refuse to accept the reality of the very real and ongoing threat to our democracy posed by Russian interference, but the people closest to him, it would appear, have given up even trying to discuss it with him… Just think about that for a moment. Our President is apparently so fragile that members of our national security team are downplaying serious, known threats to the United States while in his presence, for fear that he may “go off the rails.”
As for why Trump is refusing to accept the reality of the situation, it’s still not completely clear. It could be that he knows his campaign team colluded with the Russians, and feels as though, if he acknowledges that the Russians were actively meddling, it could bring investigators even closer to his door. Or, it could be that Putin really is holding some type of kompromat over Trump’s head, like that outlined in the Steele dossier, which makes it impossible for him say anything even remotely unflattering about Russia. [Who can forget that time when Putin expelled hundreds of diplomatic employees from Russia and Trump actually thanked him for it, saying that he’d helped our State Department cut its overhead?] Or, it could be possible that Trump is just so incredibly insecure that he can’t accept that possibility that he didn’t win the election on his own, thanks to his dazzling charm and brilliant political instincts. And it’s this last possibility that the Washington post article has me thinking about tonight.
“What if,” I wonder, “Trump didn’t know a damn thing about the collusion, and his refusal to hold the Russians accountable stems completely from a pathological need on his part to be seen as a self-made man, beholden to no one?”
I know it’s unlikely, as there seems to be evidence to support collusion, but I’m finding it fascinating to consider the possibility that, when everything else is stripped away, all of this comes down to his narcissism, and his inability to accept that, had it not been for Russian interference, Clinton would have beaten him.
Once the truth is known, I suspect we’ll see that all three were true – that he was indebted to the Russian mob, that he was being blackmailed, and that he suffered from a constellation of psychological complexes that made it impossible for him to intellectually assimilate ideas that didn’t conform to his particular worldview, especially as they involved his comically inflated image of himself as the greatest, most adored, most envied man the word has ever known. And I think that last piece is the most interesting. Everything else is just ordinary Russian organized crime stuff. It’s that last piece, though, that makes it compelling, in the same way that Tony Soprano was compelling more because of his psychological issues than any the horrific crimes we may have seen him commit. And I think that’s what people will remember about Trump. Sure, he colluded with the Russians to win an election, but, more interestingly, he was that guy who couldn’t stop lying about how his inaugural crowd was the largest in American history, when we could all clearly see from the photos, that simply wasn’t the case.
Anyway, as I sit here tonight, rereading this Washington Post report, I’m just struck by all of these phrases, like, “(there’s an) unspoken understanding within the NSC that to raise the (Russia) matter is to acknowledge its validity, which the president would see as an affront,” and “(according to an unnamed senior administration official, Trump finds) “the idea that he’s been put into office by Vladimir Putin… pretty insulting,” and it’s all just so amazing to me. I can’t believe that our President’s fragile ego, and his complete inability to hear anything that he might take as an affront, is, to a large extent, what’s driving our politics at the national level. [For instance, Trump would rather visit authoritarian regimes where they praise him, and make him feel good about himself, than our historic allies, who ask difficult questions. And, over time, that will have an impact on global politics.]
And all of this has led us to where we are today, with a president who is unable to acknowledge what all reasonable people know to be true. As Michael Hayden, who served under George W. Bush as CIA director, recently said in an interview, Trump is simply unable say what we need for him to say in order to protect our democratic institutions. “What the President has to say,” according to Hayden, “is ‘We know the Russians did it, they know they did it, I know they did it, and we will not rest until we learn everything there is to know about how and do everything possible to prevent it from happening again’.” Trump, however, according to the former CIA director, “has never said anything close to that, and will never say anything close to that.” And, as a result, we’re just waiting for the Russians to do it again…. Hayden has also said that what the Russians did in 2016 was the political equivalent of the September 11 attacks, exposing a vulnerability that we hadn’t anticipated, and requiring a unified response. A response which never came.
So, on one hand, Putin’s covert propaganda campaign has been a resounding success. He kept Clinton from the White House, and successfully destabilized our nation. And the unified response that the intelligence community wanted never came. But, Putin did’t get everything he wanted. As the author of the Washington Post piece points out, “The annexation of Crimea from Ukraine has not been recognized. Sanctions imposed for Russian intervention in Ukraine remain in place. Additional penalties have been mandated by Congress. And a wave of diplomatic retaliation has cost Russia access to additional diplomatic facilities, including its San Francisco consulate.” …So, could it be that Putin isn’t the brilliant, 3-dimensional chess-playing tactician some of us tend to think of him as, or is he more a moderately lucky gambler, who placed a bet, got Trump into office, but not much more?
This brings me to the second article I want to share tonight, which is all about how Putin (the gambler, not the 3-imensional chess player) pulled this off. The article, titled “What Putin really Wants,” is in the new issue of the Atlantic… If you don’t have time to read it, I’d recommend that you at least listen to this Pod Save America interview with the article’s author, Julia Ioffe. [The interview stats at about the 37-minute mark.]
And here’s a bit of the transcript…
IOFFE: Every new email that’s found, every new link to a Russian, or a meeting, is held up as a kind of smoking gun, with this kind of tacit implication that Trump is going to step down tomorrow. And he’s not going to. He’s stuck with us as long as we’ve got this Republican party. We’re stuck with him for the next three years. As opposed to looking at this like a national security issue, and as a broader political issue. The fact that the Russians were able to get the kind of result that they got, with not a lot of sophisticated stuff, and not a lot of strategic operative genius, is kind of an indictment of our political culture, of our media literacy, of all the things we created, that the Russians didn’t create. So we have to look at ourselves, and think about the fact that the Russians didn’t create Donald Trump. The Russians didn’t create Fox News. They didn’t create Breitbart. They didn’t create InfoWars. They didn’t create the incredibly polarized discourse. They certainly didn’t create the racist backlash to the first black American president. They didn’t create the electoral college. A lot of this stuff was there. They just kind of exploited what we gave them.
Now think back to what Hayden was saying about how this attack was like 9/11, in that it also exploited weaknesses that we’d been unaware of. It really is a great analogy, isn’t it? Only, in this case, of course, we didn’t do anything to stop it from happening again, because our President would see that as an affront to his self-image.
One last thing… If someone hasn’t developed one already, we need a good K-12 media literacy curriculum in this country, and we need to make it mandatory, and we need to do it now.
[The image and quote from the top of this post come from the Washington Post.]
