Why the Russian email-hacking scandal won’t hurt Trump

We have the verdict of the US intelligence agencies: Putin did it.

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.
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Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations — such as cyber activity — with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.”
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We assess with high confidence that the GRU [Russian military intelligence] relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks.

This is, for want of a better word, deplorable. And so is the self-serving frenzy of bluster that Trump is throwing up in response.

But none of this scandal will hurt Trump with his supporters. This is why:

Putin’s campaign to rig the election was a campaign to rig the voters. To blame him is to call them his dupes. And that won’t go down too well.

There’s no suggestion that Russia interfered with the formal electoral process, such as by hacking voting machines. That would be clear moral grounds, at least, for a re-run. Rather, Russia interfered with public opinion, by releasing anti-Clinton material — much of it false but some of it, including the hacked emails, genuine. This material went into the vast mish-mash of things on which voters based their own free choices.

For a Trump voter to accept that this taints the election result, they would have to also accept that their own vote was tainted — that they were wrong. And they won’t do that. Instead they will rationalise:

• These emails were just one thing among many, and they didn’t carry much weight in my decision.
• Well, OK, it may have been wrong to hack the emails, but they were still real, so I’m glad I knew about them.
• These claims are probably wrong — after all, the intelligence agencies are run by Obama’s people.
• There seems to be a lot of uncertainty here, so I may as well ignore the whole thing.
• So what if Putin wanted Trump? I wanted Trump!

The hacking scandal will, rightly, outrage all the people who are already rightly outraged by Trump for any number of reasons. He is a fraudster who the American people didn’t want and who has crawled into the White House on a technicality. Scandals swarm round him like flies. But this one won’t bite his voters, because their votes gave them a personal stake in the justness of his election.