What We Already Know About Trump's Ties to Russia Amounts to Treachery to the Republic
By Jonathan Chait
March 3, 2017
12:24 p.m.
The high point of Donald Trump’s presidency to date — the moment when those who desperately wanted to close their eyes and imagine a normal president standing before the country got something resembling their wish — came during his late-February speech to a joint session of Congress. Trump managed to read his address without narcissistic digressions, and the message he delivered (“Nationalism with an indoor voice,” as one White House official put it) would have been obvious to any casual listener. Over and over, Trump blamed America’s problems on foreigners or the willingness of past leaders to accommodate them: “We’ve watched our middle class shrink as we’ve exported our jobs and wealth to foreign countries”; “We’ve defended the borders of other nations while leaving our own borders wide open for anyone to cross”; “America must put its own citizens first”; “Our obligation is to serve, protect, and defend the citizens of the United States”; “My job is to represent the United States of America.”
The display of overt, bellicose nationalism presents a morbid contrast with the unfolding Russia scandal, which exposes the president’s boasts of domestic loyalty as containing all the irony of the title of the television show The Americans. The scandal is spinning off in multiple directions, but at bottom it suggests a betrayal of American sovereignty by Trump that is unprecedented in the history of the republic. For a still-unclear combination of reasons — greed for power, greed for money, vulnerability to blackmail, or motivations unknown — the incoming administration cooperated with the undermining of American democracy by a hostile foreign power.
This is already known. On July 4, Franklin Foer wrote in Slate the first major story in the American media identifying a Russian plan to influence the presidential election. He pieced together such evidence as Trump’s extensive financial ties to Russia; Vladimir Putin’s pattern of intervening in elections in the West in order to support his preferred candidates; Russia’s hacking of Democrats’ emails; and the fact that a number of Trump advisers had been paid by sources loyal to the Kremlin, including Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who had carried out a similar strategy on behalf of a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine that he seemed to be doing in the United States.
In the months that have followed, more reporting on this strange and sinister axis has emerged, mostly in the form of reports that have burst onto the scene as bombshells, only to be quickly displaced by other stories in the disorienting, surreal news environment that is Trump’s Washington. The New York Times has found that “phone records and intercepted calls” reveal that Trump associates had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials” and that U.S. allies had uncovered meetings in European cities between Russian officials and Trump associates.
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