Trump’s commitment to the American public is questionable

In my experience, this is an incredibly exhausting time to be a journalist who writes about American politics and isn’t a hermit.

With that said, I am very thankful for my friends, especially after covering the 2016 presidential election and witnessing its aftermath. A friend is an advocate, in a sense. Everyone could use one of those from time to time. And people who don’t feel that they have one are vulnerable to believing they’ve been systematically deprived of one, even if the person saying so is Donald Trump. “I am your voice,” Trump said after accepting the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland.

I hope the Americans who voted for him on that basis are satisfied with his performance. There are some journalists, who live in places like Texas, who never forgot the forgotten men and women of America in the first place. Now, as a result of the election, we have to allocate an abnormal amount of time to covering other things.

But, for what it’s worth, I was always dubious of the idea that Trump was truly committed to giving his supporters a voice, and I know some of my conservative friends felt the same way because, last spring, one of them confided he had been brooding over a possibility he found disturbing.

“I think Trump might be a pawn of the Kremlin,” said my friend, who works in politics and will remain nameless.

He hastened to lay out his evidence after assuring me he realized it sounded crazy. I can’t remember what that evidence was because it really didn’t sound crazy at all, in my opinion.

At that point, as I recall, Trump was the presumptive nominee. He had been completely open about his pro-Russia views and defensive of the country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, whenever any of his competitors challenged him on the subject.

Trump claimed that he and Putin were friends, and Putin reciprocated his esteem.

In other words, it was clearly possible that Trump was a pawn of the Kremlin, even then, if only in the sense that Putin — who is known to be a ruthless and manipulative person regardless — at some point had flattered a man who can easily be manipulated by flattery.

We know now, of course, that this was not the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. We also know that several people associated with Trump or his campaign were at least aware of it. And the question of whether any of them actually colluded with Russians in an effort to influence the outcome of the election is the subject of an ongoing investigation at the Department of Justice, led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump, who insists that there was no collusion, has also repeatedly denounced the investigation itself as nothing more than a partisan “witch hunt.”

“The Dems are using this terrible (and bad for our country) Witch Hunt for evil politics,” he tweeted in October, to give one example. ‘Beyond bizarre’

On Friday, his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, after Trump won the election.

It seems likely that further developments will be reported in due time because, in addition to pleading guilty, Flynn agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s office from this point forward.

As David French notes in a column for the National Review, Flynn’s cooperation could be quite useful if you’re a prosecutor who is trying to figure out whether Trump was in cahoots with a hostile foreign government prior to winning the election. Flynn was an adviser to his campaign and has been known to dabble in such things.

“His alleged ties to Turkey alone are beyond bizarre,” notes French.

To be clear, there’s no evidence that Flynn colluded with Russians to help Trump win, or that his contact with Kislyak after Trump won was out of line. It’s not a crime to talk to Russians.

If you’re the presidentelect of the United States, maybe you should talk to their ambassador from time to time. But considering the context — the fact that Flynn was charged with lying about contact that happened after the election — suggests that he may have agreed to testify about any contact that preceded it, and such contact would not be normal. It is not something that presidential candidates used to do, as far as I recall.

And on Saturday, the president revived the question of whether his decision to fire James Comey, the FBI director, was an effort to obstruct justice.

“I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI,” Trump said in a tweet, implying that he had asked Comey to go easy on Flynn even though he knew Flynn had committed a crime. Two clarifications

It would seem, in other words, that Mueller’s investigation has taken a serious turn for the White House. And it was never a “witch hunt” in the first place, incidentally.

I reckon Trump and his supporters will continue to call it that, though. And, in fairness, some Democrats have given the impression that they are rooting for Mueller out of partisan reasons, rather than out of a dispassionate desire to know the extent of Russia’s interference in our last presidential election, so we can better secure the integrity of our next one, assuming we’re not too exhausted to hold it at all.

I would like to emphasize two things about Friday’s development for readers who are hoping that the Russia investigation will bring Trump down.

The first is that it’s entirely possible that Trump is innocent of collusion. I’ve been suspecting that he is innocent, for the same reason I thought it was entirely possible that he might be a pawn of the Kremlin in the first place. The Trump campaign might have been tempted to accept any help Russia may have offered them, but Trump himself seems like the kind of candidate who would be offended at the suggestion — not out of commitment to democratic norms but because the suggestion itself is not flattering to him.

The second is that it is actually a crime to lie to the FBI, and Flynn has already pleaded guilty to it. So Republican leaders who continue to dismiss the investigation as a “witch hunt” at this point would be lying to the American public. That’s nothing new, of course, and Democrats sometimes do it, too.

But it actually is wrong to lie to the American public; Republicans know that. And whatever the Russians did, nothing interfered with our last election as much as the fact that so many of them were nonetheless willing to, on behalf of a candidate who dismisses all criticism as “fake news.”