Three theories to explain the Trump-Russia nexus
My official pundit’s opinion on Donald Trump, Russian election interference, collusion, kompromat and impeachment is that I’m waiting for the Mueller investigation to finish before I have a strong opinion.
So maybe this is a good time to sketch out the three main ways to understand Trump’s relationship to Russia and Putin and the 2016 hacking of his Democratic rivals.
Scenario 1: Trump being Trump: In this theory, you can explain all of Trump’s Russia-related behavior simply by finding him guilty of being the person we always knew him to be — vain, mendacious, self-serving, sleazy and absurdly stubborn, with a not-so-sneaking admiration for strongmen and the information filter of an old man who prefers his own reality to the discomforts of contrary information.
Thus Trump is friendly to Putin for the same reason that he praised the Chinese Politburo after Tiananmen Square and now praises Xi Jinping; the same reason that he likes the Saudi royals and buddies up to Recep Tayyip Erdogan; the same reason that after a brief period of bellicosity he’s ended up as a tacit apologist for Kim Jong Un. We have ample evidence, going back decades, that Trump simply likes authoritarian rulers. It’s a theory that fits Trump’s personality extremely well. So I give it a 65 percent chance of being the truth.
Scenario 2: Watergate with Russian burglars: People around Trump, including his own family members, have shown a willingness to collude with dubious figures — and this concession alone means I can’t go along with Trump apologists who insist that collusion theories don’t have any evidence behind them. And then there is the reasonable point that if he were anyone else, much of Trump’s own behavior — the firing of James Comey, the rage against the investigations — would look a lot like the behavior of a guilty man.
We now know that the Russian hackers also accessed Democratic campaign analytics, a prize that would have been hard to fully weaponize if they weren’t shared directly with the Trump campaign.
If the Trump campaign got stolen campaign data and Trump knew enough about it to inform his firing of Comey, that’s collusion and a case for impeachment wrapped into one scenario. And the odds that something like this is the truth I place at 25 percent.
Scenario 3: The Muscovite Candidate: That leaves 10 percent for the most dramatic theory, which is that any collusion is connected to a much longer-running Russian intelligence operation.
Most of that 10 percent covers the narrow version of this theory, in which Putin and Co. are blackmailing Trump with damaging financial information or with the mythical-or-is-it pee tape. A much smaller fraction is left for the more baroque theory, elaborated by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine recently, that Trump was actually compromised-cum-recruited by Russian intelligence all the way back in 1987.
Trump seems like too brazen a sinner to be effectively blackmailed. Meanwhile, the administration’s actual Russia policy, with its combination of the public bromance with Putin and more hawkish policies behind the scenes, would be a strange way for a Kremlin stooge to play his part.
Don’t fit me for that #Resistance shirt just yet; my money is still on the strange-but-not-that-crazy explanations for our president’s behavior. But in the age of Donald Trump, everyone should hedge their bets.