The original Vlad the Impaler was a brutal 15th-century Romanian tyrant whose sobriquet derived from his practice of executing his enemies by impalement. (He was of the Dracula family, later said to be the inspiration for the Bram Stoker novel of that name.) In the 21st Century, Vladimir Putin is said to favor poisoning and other methods of dispatching his victims, but he might easily lay claim to being an Impaler as well. In any case, when Donald Trump held a press conference with Putin in Helsinki, he displayed the kind of respectful deference that a supplicant might have accorded the earlier Vlad. The swaggering bully who had just come from threatening NATO allies and criticizing the British Prime Minister was seen only in glimpses when he swiped at Democrats and the Mueller investigation. By contrast, he directed not a word of criticism, or even so much as a mild caution, at Putin and Russia, Indeed, his remarks to and about Putin could scarcely have been warmer.
Trump’s most controversial remarks at the press conference came when he was asked whether he believed the assessment of the United States intelligence community that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election, or believed Putin’s denials. Trump’s reply caused a firestorm of criticism because he indicated that he didn’t know whom to believe but seemed clearly to favor Putin’s “strong and forceful” denials. At the same time, much of his reply mysteriously dwelt on complaints about “missing” computer servers and Hillary Clinton’s emails. As a whole, the response was so problematic that it deserves to be quoted in full:
REPORTER, AP: President Trump, you first. Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. My first question for you sir is, who do you believe? My second question is would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin, would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?
TRUMP: So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee?
I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying?
With that being said, all I can do is ask the question.
My people came to me, Dan Coats, came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia.
I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server but I have, I have confidence in both parties.
I really believe that this will probably go on for a while but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC?
Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone, just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily.
I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s thirty three thousand e-mails.
I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer.
He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Ok? Thank you.
While many readers may be puzzled by Trump’s peculiar references to missing servers of the Democratic National Committee and a “Pakistani gentleman,” the short answer is that there simply are no missing servers and there never have been. Trump’s claim of such has been refuted by numerous media accounts, with perhaps the fullest and clearest explanation found in The Daily Beast.
Setting aside that non-issue, and Trump’s perennial whine about Clinton emails, the question remained not only as to whom Trump believed, but whether he would denounce what had been done in 2016 and warn Putin not to do it again. But having decided that he knew not whom to believe, Trump was clearly of no mind to denounce anything, let alone warn against its repetition.
On Tuesday, Trump sought to stem the tide of criticism that his press conference had provoked among Republicans as well as Democrats. He read a statement that had clearly been prepared and force-fed to him by an anguished staff, and that showed all the conviction of recitals by hostages or prisoners of war. The escape route from his comments the day before probably deserves at least a small niche in the annals of creative writing: Trump explained that “In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ The sentence should have been: ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’ Sort of a double negative.” The proffered explanation gets high marks for imagination, but is hardly persuasive when the sentence is read in context and even less so when viewed on the video where Trump clearly placed emphasis on “would.”
Trump’s effort at damage control also included the statement that “I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place.” Immediately afterward, however, Trump undermined his “acceptance” by departing from his typewritten notes to add “It could be other people also. A lot of people out there.” The assessment of the intelligence community, of course, had made no reference to “other people” as a source of interference in the 2016 election. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump did not say whether he also accepted the intelligence community’s assessment that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help [Trump’s] election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” Even more fundamentally, Trump continued to ignore the second question put to him by the reporter in Helsinki: “[W]ould you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin, would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?” Trump’s “clean-up” contained neither denunciation nor warning. The latter omission was particularly dismaying in the light of statements by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats only last week that Russia is currently targeting the 2018 midterm elections.
On Wednesday morning, Trump managed to compound the confusion even further by apparently saying “no” to a reporter’s question of whether Russia was still targeting the U.S. This would have flatly contradicted Coats and it promised to create a new uproar on Capitol Hill. So the dutiful Sarah Huckabee Sanders later popped up to claim that what Trump had really meant to say was that “no” he would not answer more questions. All in all, one was reminded of the famous question Manager Casey Stengel put to the New York Mets in their first year, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Then, on Wednesday evening, Trump’s duplicity was put into even sharper relief by a stunning New York Times story revealing that on January 6, 2017, two weeks before his inauguration, senior intelligence officials showed Trump highly classified information indicating that “Putin had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.” According to the Times story, Trump appeared to be “grudgingly convinced” at that point but would thereafter attempt to “cloud the very clear findings” he had received that day.
Trump’s dreadful performance in Helsinki gave rise to a wave of speculation that “Putin must have something on Trump.” Such speculation cannot be dismissed entirely, but it should be regarded with considerable caution. Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times, provides a thoughtful analysis of that theory as well as two others in “Trump and Russia: One Mystery, Three Theories.” Readers who are interested in pondering Trump’s motivations will find the Douthat column a very helpful guide.
In the meantime, it is abundantly clear that whatever Trump’s motivations, he is a president in desperate need of being reined in. But that is a task too large for White House staff or Cabinet officials, and it is doubtful whether the Republican-controlled Congress has the stomach for it. To be sure, the Helsinki spectacle has produced some sprouts of independence on Capitol Hill, but whether they take root and grow into effective action remains very much to be seen. A good place to start would be to follow through on demands for testimony as to the substance of discussions between Trump and Putin. Trump described the discussions as a “negotiation” and any negotiation involves offers on the one hand and demands or requests on the other. Let Congress penetrate the veil of secrecy to learn what was offered by each party and what was demanded or requested, and what, if anything, was agreed to. One important subject that Putin and Trump must have discussed in their private meeting, but which neither mentioned at the press conference, is the matter of existing sanctions on Russia. Yet that is a matter known to be of high interest to Putin and one on which Trump has appeared to be quite spongy. Congress should insist on knowing whether, and to what extent, Trump encouraged Putin to believe that sanctions relief would be forthcoming and, if so, under what circumstances.
As always, the principal obstacle to imposing any discipline on Trump lies with his base, as formidable as it is hard to fathom, seemingly impervious to staggering incompetence as well as to misguided policies. If the debacle at Helsinki, following on the heels of the debacle at our southern border makes no impression on that base, what will it take?
Our country will be much better off once Trump is gone. He is a dangerous egomaniac and a disloyal citizen. In better times, a person of such horrible character and ignorance could never have become president. Trump’s motive, if one can attribute motive to a crazy person, is to hog the spotlight and do mischief whenever possible. His days in office are numbered. He will be knocked off of his pedestal.
Another excellent analysis, Doug. As former President George H.W. Bush would say, we are in deep do-do. Trump careens from one appalling misstep to another, unable to see his way out of the tailspin he created. He reportedly was furious on the flight back to the U.S. over the backlash to his performance in Helsinki. His attempts to “correct” the record are pathetic. Given his track record, none of this is particularly surprising except in the degree. What does amaze me, as it does many people, is that so many smart people still haven’t caught on or are reluctant to acknowledge the truth about Trump. Do not put any hope in impeachment. We can only hope enough people wake up by 2020 to vote him out of office.
Doug, I’m too shocked and confused to have anything of value to add to your as-always eloquent, pithy and witty analysis, nor to the apt comments of Messrs. Pierce and Webster…except to suggest (hope) that Trump’s tariffs might backfire in the heartland from whence I come (hurting both the auto industry and agriculture). In my judgment, Midwest Dems (and anti-Trump Republicans, to the extent there are any seeking elective office) should take that show-on-the-road asap.
Roberto Bolano, the (recently deceased) Latin American novelist and poet, wrote a masterful, albeit willfully opaque, novel, called “2666”. He has much to say, in an indirect fashion, about ‘the rough beast, its hour come round at last’ . . .
A quote from “2666”.
“He meets a jazz musician, who tells him about chickens that talk and probably think. ‘The worst of it’, the musician says to him, is that the governments of the planet know it and that’s why so many people raise chickens.’ The boy objects that the chickens are raised to be eaten. The musicians says that’s what the chicken wants. And he finishes by saying: ‘Fucking masochistic chickens, they have our leaders by the balls’.
The history of the world is as much the history of a yearning for chaos as it is about a yearning for order, and perhaps more subtly yet, it is about the human ability to misconstrue those two desires; we are past masters when it comes to convincing ourselves that our primitive urges are in fact respectable urges.
Bolano suggests that the greatest fear of all may be the fear of nullity, the fear of never having made a mark on the world, the fear of having been, yes, a ‘loser’ in life. He suggests that these fears can be assuaged when you inflict damage on others, on people you perceive as your ‘enemies’ . . .
Leave a footprint. Or a boot-print.
It is of course a comforting thought that man is rational, and that no rational person would inflict damage upon his own person just so as to inflict greater damage on his perceived ‘foe’. But we are not, finally, as rational as we would like to think we are: men like Trump, Erdogan, Putin, Duterte, etc., etc., etc., amass enough power to feed that rough beast, and fatten it, because the beast wants feeding . . .
All of these men, and so many others, feed the beast on vile and dehumanizing policies that feel good because they are brutal, because they are cruel, because they are wanton. Women are treated as sexual objects, gay people are treated like they are unclean, and people of color are called ‘animals’ or ‘vermin’, the two words that Donald Trump used in reference to Hispanic men that to me, mark him as a traitor to our country and it’s putative values. Taking nothing away from the obscenity of his canoodling with tyrants everywhere, taking nothing away from anything he said or did in Helsinki, it is the fact that he is a loathsome racist that we must continually abhor, and that we must continually reprimand the Republican party for conveniently ignoring (if not supporting outright).
Historically speaking, the slouching continues until enough men, and women, of courage figure out how to pull themselves together into a group, and interpose themselves in the path of the beast . . .
If baked-in Constitutional checks on democracy (CA and WYOMING each get two senators: an idea whose time is DONE), increased voter suppression, gerrymandered districts, hostile courts, propagandistic television networks, racism institutionalized to the point where it makes citizens afraid to gather in the public square and etc., all continue to combine to make it impossible for the majority of Americans to feel that they actually have any power to effectuate change . . . well, then our options become infinitely more terrifying . . . we will either continue to acquiesce or we will rebel. If the former, we will become a fascist country – fascist lite, perhaps, but fascist, nonetheless. if the latter . . . none of us can imagine what that will look like.
But a country in which 65 percent of the people are effectively denied the ability to exert their will and influence ain’t a democracy . . . our forefathers were willing to pledge their honor and their fortunes to stand up to a ‘tyranny’ infinitely less tyrannical than the one we face now . . . the masochistic chickens have our leaders by the balls, and they have us by the balls, in turn.
I hope enough people are prepared to do whatever is necessary if and when the time comes. And I quiver to say it. But that rough beast is slouching closer and closer, all around the world . . .
Gee, I thought treason was an impeachable offense. Apparently not.
Treason is an impeachable offense but what Trump has done so far is probably not treason as defined in the constitution:
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”
In the view of most legal scholars, because we are not at war with Russia, Russia is not an “enemy.” Hence, giving aid and comfort to Russia is not treason.
In terms of impeachment,of course, an impeachable offense is pretty much whatever Congress thinks it is (by the House impeaching and the Senate convicting.) Nevertheless, even if the Democrats were to gain control of the House in November, the bar for conviction by the Senate would remain quite high. I believe it would take very clear and convincing evidence of a very serious offense.
Doug, as always, thank you for your erudite analysis (and obscure historical reference). What will it take? Clearly a lot. While it would be foolish to be confident, given the indictments so far, there is reason to hope that Robert Mueller’s investigation will reveal facts that make the scope of Trump’s mendacity and corruption clearer. Beyond that — and this is not something to hope for — a foreign policy or economic crisis might convince some of the current supports that they have been sold a bill of goods. Finally, a change in the control of the House and Senate certainly couldn’t hurt.
Yes. Your final question is the most important. I have no idea if the divide cane be bridged, although I stand on the “yes” side without knowing why. The real danger, Putin/CCCP aside, is a permanent gulf twixt ‘left’ and ‘right’. Sad.
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