Russian revelations may finally drive Trump out
The Fourth of July, Independence Day in the U.S.A. — and the moment we should give our American friends and neighbours a figurative hug and our best wishes. More than ever this year, they are in desperate need of it.
But while you’re at it, be sure to ask them about the issue historians a century from now will marvel at, when they reflect back at this insane period of the 21st century in which we are living.
Your question could go something like this:
“Excuse me, and not wanting to intrude on your holiday merriment, but could you please take a moment and explain to me how it is that you elected a Russian stooge to serve in the Oval Office as your president?”
The corollary question, of course, is this: “And just out of curiosity, what do the Russians and Vladimir Putin actually have on Donald Trump?”
If you have been living on the moon during the past four years — still clinging to the illusion that U.S. democracy is alive and well — now is the time for you to return to Earth so that we can tell you that there is now little doubt that Trump’s campaign promise in 2016 should have been “Russia First,” not
“America First.”
Trump’s suspected true loyalties — not to the U.S. but to Russia — have been a source of controversy since the day he took office, but this week’s developments stunned even his most ardent supporters.
Reports in the New York Times and Washington Post this week revealed that a Russian military intelligence unit paid bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers. The newspapers state that since at least last February, and perhaps as early as March 2019, Trump’s administration knew about it and did nothing to stop it or reprimand Russia because of it.
In fact, during the weeks after this intelligence appeared in the highly classified presidential daily briefing, Trump took part in six separate and apparently friendly conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin — including one in which he was invited to rejoin the Group of Seven summit — without mentioning a word about the
Russian bounty reports.
The reports threw the White House into a frenzy of contradictions and half-truths.
At first Trump denied he knew anything about it, but then fell back to his familiar playbook.
He dismissed the intelligence as “possibly another fabricated Russia hoax, maybe by the Fake News … wanting to make the Republicans look bad.” He added, with typical eloquence: “From what I hear, and I hear it pretty good, the intelligence people — many of them — didn’t believe it happened at all.”
This is simply the latest example of when the U.S. president, incomprehensibly, has excused Russian behaviour in the face of his own intelligence agencies. Do you remember when Trump accepted Russian denials that it interfered in the 2016 presidential election? His statements in Helsinki in 2018 as he stood alongside Putin will surely be put into a time capsule for future historians to figure out.
“President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Assuming that we will one day get an answer to this question — “What did Putin have on Trump?” — it seems likely that it will be all about the money, as it always is with Trump.
Once his tax returns are finally made public, we will find out how virtually bankrupt the so-called Trump “business empire” was in the 1990s and how an assortment of Russians — oligarchs, mobsters and shady business types with close ties to Putin — kept Trump afloat.
And then, as Trump went for the presidency, they gained in power and influence.
In a revealing 2018 essay in the New Yorker — titled “A Theory of Trump Kompromat” — journalist Adam Davidson wrote: “There is no need to assume that Trump was a formal agent of Russian intelligence to make sense of Trump’s solicitousness toward Putin.”
He cited Keith Darden, an international relations professor at American University in Washington who has studied the Russian use of kompromat (compromising material): “He thinks it is likely that the president believes the Russians have something on him.”
Darden observed, “(Trump has) never said a bad word about Putin. He has exercised a degree of self-control with respect to Russia that he doesn’t with anything else.”
But it is becoming obvious that, in other respects at least, Trump is losing control and becoming desperate.
He seems to have given up in the battle against the pandemic. The U.S. economy is showing no signs of a quick rebound. And virtually every poll is now indicating that his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, is heading to victory in November’s election.
Given that, what will Trump do?
There is some speculation in the U.S. media now that he is frightened at the prospect of a humiliating loss — and may consider some sort of retreat.
That is what I predicted in 2018: that once Trump believes “he could never be re-elected in 2020 and realizes he may end up in jail,” he would do what Richard Nixon did in 1974 and resign. This would be in exchange for a full pardon for him and his family from Mike Pence, who would have become the new president in that scenario.
The only consolation for the rest of us is that Pence would likely meet the same political fate as Gerald Ford, who lost his 1976 election bid to keep the presidency after pardoning Nixon.
Pence would be crushed in any election against Joe Biden, and this surreal chapter in U.S. history would come to a close. We hope.
Tony Burman, formerly head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, is a freelance contributing foreign affairs columnist for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyBurman