Is the president of the United States a Russian operative?
Judy Klass, Truman Scholar, D.Phil Political Science/Latin American Studies, bookish wonk
Clearly, that is the case. Look at all the people who were in his campaign, and his administration who lied about their contacts with Russia — from Attorney General Sessions during his Senate confirmation hearings, to Don Jr to Jared to Flynn (who lied about discussing sanctions with Kislyak, and thus was compromised thereafter — Russia could blackmail him with the threat of exposing his lie, and when Sally Yates warned Trump about that, the incoming president shrugged and kept Flynn on for two more weeks as national security adviser, hearing top-secret intelligence) to Manafort, who groomed another Putin stooge: Yanukovych in Ukraine. Look at all the people in Trump’s campaign and administration who have been indicted, and how many have pled guilty and how many are going to jail, and how many are cooperating with the Mueller investigation to obtain reduced sentences. If this was a made-up “witch hunt” and these people had done nothing — why would they plead guilty, and why would courts convict them?
Why did Jared lie hundreds of times, on his security clearance forms about contacts with Russians and other foreign representatives? Repeatedly, as he re-submitted the forms. (Each lie/omission could be counted as a felony.) Why did Jared try to set up, with Kislyak, a secret channel of communications with Russia, operated out of a Russian facility, that our intelligence services could not monitor? Why did Trump have his interpreter destroy her notes after one of Trump’s meetings with Putin, and why is Trump the only American president who, when he meets with his Russian counterpart, refuses to tell his staff what they talked about, and sometimes only has Russians in the room?
Trump hollered “No collusion!” for years. But the Trump Tower meeting, itself, was, by definition, collusion. The Russians contact Don Jr and say: hey, let’s get together and collude, and we’ll give you dirt on Hillary Clinton, and the implied quid pro quo in exchange is that if we help your father get into office, he’ll do what we want and get rid of the Magnitsky Act and lift sanctions. Don Jr writes back “I love it!” He passes the original email along to Jared and Manafort; they all take the meeting with the Russians to collude. Then they get caught and they lie and say it was a meeting about adoptions, and then Trump gets caught lying about helping his son draft a lying letter about the meeting … And Rudy Giuliani changes the public statements from “No collusion!” to “Hey, if there was collusion, so what? Collusion is not a crime …”
Yeah, but treason is. Obtaining help from an enemy foreign power to dishonestly win a US election is. Sure, lots of politicians get dirt on their enemies during campaigns. There are legal ways to do that. But what happened during the Watergate break-in was not okay. “Plumbers” from President Nixon’s “Dirty Tricks Committee” were caught burglarizing the DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel during the 1972 election in order to steal memos and documents they could then somehow use against the Democrats. Burglary is not okay. What the Russians did when they hacked the DNC emails and John Podesta’s emails, colluding with Trump’s people, was the equivalent of the Watergate break-in, with the following differences: in 2016 it was a virtual, online break-in instead of physically forcing your way into someone else’s office; it was successful; and instead of five American dirty tricksters carrying out the crime, it was conducted by cyber spies for an enemy foreign power.
Trump on the campaign trail said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” In other words, traitor Trump was publicly inviting an enemy foreign power to hack the private correspondence of an American: his opponent in the race and our former Secretary of State. He talked about how our media would respond — he seemed sure that there was classified stuff in Hillary’s emails, and encouraged the Russians to get their hands on it and make it public. Trump saying that seems to have been the signal. The Russians made their first attempt to break into Hillary Clinton’s servers that day.
Is Trump a “witting” or “unwitting” spy, does he formally pledge fealty to Russia and Putin (beyond the lavish praise and groveling before Putin we’ve heard from him in so many public statements), is Russia the country he feels most loyal to or the only country manipulating him? We can’t know those things yet, and it hardly matters. Since Trump doesn’t believe in anything, and we’re talking about oligarchs, opportunists and those who think in terms of gangster states — it’s not a matter of loyalty to a coherent ideology, as with many Soviet spies during the Cold War. Trump probably doesn’t consciously think in terms of “Am I betraying my oath to the US Constitution, and am I selling out the American people by working for Russia?” because Trump doesn’t ever give a moment’s thought to questions like that. Trump thinks about me, me, me, me, me. And it’s in the interests of him, him, him, him, him to do what Putin tells him to do.
A Russian operative in the White House would try to advance Putin’s policy goals, and that’s what Trump does. The one major issue his campaign cared about before the GOP Convention, the one part of the Republican platform they were really insistent about changing, was Trump demanded the RNC take out language criticizing Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea; Trump was adamant that the GOP should go soft on Russia and let it invade its neighbors whenever it likes, without threat of penalty. Trump is doing his best to weaken NATO and push away our traditional allies (England, all of Western Europe) just as Putin wants him to do. Weakening our leadership position in the world and the bonds of trust and cooperation between real democracies is in the interests of Russia, not the United States. Trump has tried to end sanctions on Russia and Russian oligarchs (Congress gets in his way, but we’ll see if they can keep him from ending sanctions against the Russian oligarch that Mnuchin recently announced), and Trump recently said oh, we’re going to pull out of Syria in the next thirty days, which was news to everyone in his administration — but just what Russia wanted to hear.
Now, we are learning that Trump has repeatedly told his advisers that he wants to withdraw from NATO. Destroying NATO would be Putin’s dream come true:
Trump Discussed Pulling U.S. From NATO, Aides Say Amid New Concerns Over Russia
Does Trump pass along sensitive classified information to the Russians, as a spy would? Sure he does. We know that the day after he fired Comey over the Russia investigation, and he had Lavrov and the spy Kislyak over to the White House and in the Oval Office with nobody around but people in the Russians’ group, he casually handed over to them some very sensitive, classified intelligence the Israelis had given us, which will make the Israelis think twice before passing along other intelligence to us that might save US lives — because when Trump just hands those kinds of secrets to the Russians, it could compromise the undercover people working for Israel in dangerous places who obtained it.
How do we know about what went on with the Russians in the Oval Office? At least in part because Putin playfully likes to repay Trump’s gestures of fealty sometimes by humiliating him. The Russians published their photos from the Oval and Trump’s remarks about how the heat from the “Russia thing” was off now that he’d fired Comey, etc, and when Trump’s people found out Trump had released that highly classified Israeli intel, they scrambled to do damage control. Recently, when Trump said he was getting out of Syria, Putin said he thought “Donald” was right. Trump doesn’t refer to Putin as “Vladimir.” It was a sneer, a show of power, a boss giving his nod of approval, what Putin said — a pat on the head for a good, obedient doggy. That is what the president of the United States has been reduced to. Perhaps, when Yanukovych was in office in Ukraine and working for Putin in the same way, before the Ukrainian people rose up and Yanukovych had to flee to Russia where he now lives, Putin was equally contemptuous of him.
What people are understanding more now is that when Trump undermines the investigation of what Russia did in the 2016 election, by firing Comey, etc, he’s not just covering his own butt — that may be a major way he follows orders. Putin does not want our intelligence agencies to understand what the Russians are doing here, so when Trump tries to prevent that kind of intelligence-gathering, it may be because of his direct marching orders from the Kremlin.
So, why does Trump work for Putin? More and more of the Steele Dossier is being vindicated by the things we’re learning — does this mean there really is a pee pee tape? Not necessarily. Putin might know enough about the ways Trump (and Jared and Don Jr) are “dirty” and compromised from the 2016 campaign for that to be the kompromat Putin holds over Trump’s head and uses to manipulate him. Or — it may simply be a matter of Trump as an incompetent and corrupt businessman. For decades, lots of people have not wanted to do business with Trump because he’s a con man who does not pay people he signs contracts with, or else he pays thirty cents on the dollar. For decades, legit banks have not wanted to work with Trump because he’s a corrupt loser who goes bankrupt and blows deals and cannot be trusted to honor agreements or repay loans. As Don Jr said before the election, a LOT of the family business in the last decade or so was with Russia. It wasn’t just about Trump taking a beauty pageant there. Russians buy condos in Trump properties. Russians fund Trump projects. The Trumps work with Russian gangsters and launder their money; they did it often through the Bayrock Group, and sometimes with help from Deutsch Bank. Buying and selling condos is a good way to launder money. We now know that, well into the 2016 campaign, Russians were dangling the possibility of a Trump Tower Moscow before Trump. Trump had Russian gangsters like Felix Sater in Trump Tower in NYC, and Sater worked for the Trump Organization on and off for more than ten years. As a narcissistic sociopath, Trump is the kind of useful idiot that people involved with recruiting spies like to cultivate. He and his family respond to “dangles” (like the invitation to collude at the Trump Tower meeting). At this point they are all in, when it comes to Russia.
That doesn’t mean that Saudi Arabia and lots of other countries don’t own parts of Donald Trump as well, in similar ways. There are good reasons why he will not release his tax returns — and it is not because he has been under audit for three years.
But it doesn’t seem to just be about money. Putin (along with other autocrats) seems to have replaced Fred C. Trump in Donald Trump’s life. Donald Trump is an incompetent fool who has frittered away his family fortune; his father gave him (legally and illegally) over four hundred million dollars over the course of Trump’s life, and Trump has gone bankrupt and blown that money in a thousand ways. Putin is his new daddy (along with others, possibly) who gives him money now, and Putin may also heap scorn on Donald and treat him with occasional viciousness, but then, so did Fred — it’s what Trump expects in a daddy. It makes him want to fawn on the guy, and try to earn his approval, all the more.
So, what do we do with this extraordinary situation — a president of the United States who is an operative of an enemy foreign power? We’ve never been in a place this awful before, and it is compounded by the fact that Trump’s party puts party over country and everything else. Why did the Republicans not investigate the strong indications that Trump (and therefore our national security) was compromised in these ways for the TWO YEARS that they controlled all of Congress? Why did they pretend that it was normal and okay for Trump to believe Putin OVER THE US INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY when Trump was deferring to Putin in Helsinki and saying oh, he says he didn’t interfere in our elections, and why would he, and he’s made this amazing offer to fix our election security for us …? Why does Lindsey Graham, upon hearing that the FBI thought they had enough evidence (probably with secret evidence we don’t know about, in addition to Trump’s nutty public behavior involving the firing of Comey: his interview with Lester Holt, etc) to open an investigation into whether Trump is a Russian operative, make it sound like the FBI is the problem, and Graham is going to have to come down on them? How can the Republicans be so unpatriotic and such a group of utter scoundrels, risking our national security and national sovereignty as well as our elections in this way?
Maybe some of them are as compromised as Trump? Maybe they know things about what went on during the 2016 elections, involving Russia, that they don’t want to see brought to light, either? Or maybe they’re just playing to the Republican base — which has given up on facts, fact-checking, evidence, the fact-based universe and reality in general, along with science and believing communities of experts about climate change, etc, specifically. Over half of all Republicans say they would be fine if Trump somehow canceled or indefinitely postponed the 2020 elections. The Constitution our Founders gave us is no longer a priority for them. Democracy is a term Republicans are more and more wary of. Lots of Republicans on Quora dismiss democracy as “mob rule.” Republicans understand that if the US were to become an actual democracy, they would never win another presidential election — just as they did not win democratically in 2000 or 2016. They’re fine with voter suppression, voter roster purges, gerrymandering on steroids, easily hacked voting machines with no paper trail, leaders who lie in every tweet or utterance, the destruction of the system of checks and balances — and, apparently, they’re fine with Vladimir Putin, the former KGB spook who surveils our power grid and economic system and nuclear power plants, also taking over our country via a Manchurian Candidate (or Manchurian Cantaloupe, as some have called our orange president) in the White House. It’s all good — whatever keeps Republicans in power. And people like Graham from South Carolina and McConnell from Kentucky know what the people want — and play to their base.
But, getting back to the original question: Does Trump do what Putin wants? Check. Yes, he does. Did Trump collude with Russia during the campaign? Check. Yes, he and his family and campaign staff did. Does Trump give classified American secrets to top Russian spies? Yes, he does. Is Donald Trump a Russian operative? Absolutely. |
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