Trump on the path to impeachment
When the U.S. House of Representatives considers a bill of impeachment against Donald Trump — as it likely will in the spring of 2019 — the first article will have been written in his meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin this week in Helsinki.
There, in an unprecedented display in great-power summit diplomacy, the president of the United States abdicated his responsibility to defend his country against an attack from a foreign power. The attack came from Russia, which used cyber warfare to try to fix the 2016 presidential election.
Consider this: The commander-in-chief of the United States stands beside the president of the Russian Federation and absolves him of blame for meddling in a democratic election. Trump asked Putin if he had interfered, Putin said no — Scout’s honour! — and America’s naïf believed him.
Forget the findings of a congressional committee that concluded there was Russian interference. Forget 32 indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, including those of 12 Russian agents last week. Forget the body of excellent investigative reporting on Russia, including a cover story on its hackers, What Putin Really Wants, in The Atlantic earlier this year.
Let’s be clear: We are not talking about collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, which is unproven; on that we await Mueller’s conclusions this autumn. We are talking about Russian hackers breaking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign email accounts and using that information to influence the election.
Barack Obama knew about this in the autumn of 2016. It’s the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as the FBI and the Department of Justice. It is conventional wisdom for everyone but Donald Trump, a conspiracy theorist who said Obama was born in Kenya and that three-million illegal voters cost Trump the popular vote in 2016.
His self-abasement before Putin in Helsinki was not just an extension of his assault on the liberal international order, which characterized his visit to Europe. This includes his skepticism of NATO and the European Union, his assessment of Angela Merkel as a pawn of the Russians (what does that make him?) and his gaucherie toward Teresa May while he was in Britain.
It is more than that: With Putin, it’s a wilful denial of the world’s most mischievous authoritarian — the man who annexed Crimea, sent rebels into Ukraine, supports Assad’s terror in Syria and poisoned one of his former spies in Britain. Putin wants to shatter the western alliance; in Donald Trump, he has a collaborator and useful idiot. Putin cannot believe his luck.
Of course, Trump did not raise Crimea, Ukraine or Syria in his news conference with Putin. From Trump there was not a word, not a wagging finger, to repudiate a strong man who rules for life, crushes his opponents, murders journalists and enriches himself. Not a word of warning to an enemy; Trump reserves that exquisite disdain for allies such as Merkel, May and Justin Trudeau.
Instead, here was Trump casting himself as Bismarck. Relations between the United States and Russia had “NEVER been worse,” Trump tweeted (having never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Cold War). Then, as he did with North Korea in Singapore, he fixed everything.
Trump fancies himself as Winston Churchill, whom he seems to have discovered by watching Darkest Hour. In Helsinki, more likely, he was Neville Chamberlain. At least Hitler had nothing personally incriminating on Chamberlain: Perhaps Putin does have something, which would explain Trump’s peculiar appeasement.
In Washington, the Vichy Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, were neither angry nor aggrieved. They managed no more than tepid statements of disagreement.
They left outrage to heroic Sen. John McCain, who rose from his sickbed (he’s fighting brain cancer) to excoriate Trump for betraying the United States. He was one of the few Republicans to speak the truth. Clear-minded people across the spectrum see the president’s performance in Helsinki for what it is: an act of treason, one of the “high crimes and misdemeanours” that will drive the coming impeachment of Donald J. Trump.