To Russia, with loyalty (if not Love)
On Monday morning, President Donald J. Trump finally got around to definitively declaring that he didn’t work for Russia. With every other president we’ve ever had — including the bad ones — this was already baked into the expectations of the citizens.
Not with this guy. It is not reasonable to assume our current president doesn’t have divided loyalties. That’s not to say that that his kowtowing to Vladimir Putin has anything to do with an ideological commitment to communism over capitalism. These days, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a bigger swamp of crony capitalism than the Kremlin.
No, Mr. Trump’s divided loyalties are caused by being forced to choose between his economic self-interest and the inconvenient obligations of democratic governance. It’s supposed to be difficult to make a dishonest buck playing footsies with Russian oligarchs when you’re the president of the United States.
When Mr. Trump phoned into his pal Judge Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show on Saturday night, she gave him every opportunity to set the record straight about The New York Times’ bombshell from the previous day.
He either couldn’t or wouldn’t dispute the substance of the story other than to say how “disgraceful” the paper’s coverage of him has been and how insulting the question of whether he was “working for Russia” was. He never directly answered Ms. Pirro’s offer to state unequivocally that he “didn’t work for Russia.”
Mr. Trump’s non-denial denial on Fox was noted on the Sunday talk shows where political scribes and legal analysts debated the implications of a sitting president being the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation to figure out whether he was a willing Russian asset or merely a useful idiot.
Critics of the president have to admit that “are you a Russian asset” is the ultimate loaded question that Mr. Trump is particularly ill-equipped to answer honestly without incriminating himself. Every utterance and every tweet he’s generated as president has already revealed him to be guilty of something.
Still, on Monday morning, Mr. Trump finally figured out that being coy only increased his guilt in the eyes of most Americans. “I never worked for Russia and you know that answer better than anyone,” he said tearing into a reporter. “Not only did I never work for Russia, but I think it’s a disgrace that you even asked the question. Because it’s a whole, big fat hoax. It’s just a hoax.”
Mr. Trump said this on the heels of a Washington Post story that reports he confiscated the notes from the interpreter who accompanied him to his meeting with Mr. Putin in Helsinki and ordered the linguist not to brief the American national security staff on what transpired between the two leaders.
No, that doesn’t look suspicious, at all…
There is no doubt that the WaPo story is true and that Mr. Trump looks guilty for refusing to allow an honest account of that meeting to become a part of the official narrative. Mr. Trump is supposed to represent the interests of the American people, yet he consistently operates like an independent contractor on the international stage. We know he’s hiding something, but we don’t know what it is.
Let that sink in. It is indisputable that Mr. Trump is keeping secrets from the American people about our relationship with Russia despite the fact he ostensibly works for us and not the other way around.
So we’re forced to ask a loaded question again and again: why does Mr. Trump consistently act as if he has something to hide when it comes to the Russians?
Why is the first instinct of every Trump official or campaign worker who hasn’t made a plea deal with Robert Mueller’s office to lie about the nature of Trump World’s contacts with the Russians? Why does the appearance of guilt attach itself to this president the way iron filaments stick to magnets?
I would go so far as to say we’re long past the point where we can reasonably give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the Russians. It is unreasonable to expect the American people not to strongly suspect Mr. Trump of hiding something that he obviously believes would imperil his presidency.
There’s a halo of guilt around this president that won’t go away with lame complaints about a “deep state conspiracy” or “lynching by a lying, liberal media.” Mr. Trump lies, and in a demonstrable way, way too often for there not to be something rotten in Denmark (or Helsinki).
On Fox News, where many of the hosts play defense on behalf of Mr. Trump’s presidency, they’ve given up trying to present a coherent theory or alibi for his actions and words they know wouldn’t survive a news cycle without being shredded by the latest damning revelation. On Fox, they simply allow the president unfiltered access to his base and let him do his own lying to the people most inclined to support him no matter what.
At this point, I would gladly consider even one innocent, non-sinister explanation for Donald Trump’s ongoing dance with the Russians that doesn’t insult our collective intelligence, if only to give our imaginations a vigorous workout in the other direction.