The Central Claim in Josh Marshall’s Blog Post About Russia and Trump is False
A central claim in Josh Marshall’s widely-circulated blog post detailing Trump’s alleged ties to nefarious Russians has to do with the GOP platform-drafting process. Marshall first lays out a bunch of disparate facts showing that Trump has done deals with various people connected in one way or another to Russia. Taken alone, this might be interesting, but likely not indicative of any potential Kremlin-backed conspiracy to infiltrate the US electoral process. However, the kicker of the post comes when Marshall presents a knot that supposedly ties together all the loose ends: Trump, keen to upend the world order in Putin’s favor, conspicuously altered the GOP platform in such a way that empowers Russia. This is doubly notable, Marshall posits, because Trump otherwise took no interest in the platform.
“The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform,” Marshall writes, and “mobilized” only for “one big” purpose: to soften language on a provision supporting US efforts to arm Ukrainian “rebels” in their fight against Russian “aggression.”
If Trump’s campaign representatives were in fact totally indifferent to every other aspect of the platform-drafting process, but out of nowhere scrambled to alter language pertaining to Ukraine, that might be worth pointing out. Unfortunately for Marshall, that’s not an accurate characterization of what happened. POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney, who covered the platform hearings, told me on Twitter that Trump campaign reps also “played a role on trade issues,” working to comport the platform language with what Trump has been saying in the campaign. One of Cheney’s dispatches from Cleveland documents all the ways in which Trump reps were deeply involved in modifying trade-related provisions. (Cheney also suggested that Trump’s people took a strong interest in monitoring platform language on immigration, but may not have directly intervened — only because delegates changed language to comport with Trump’s rhetoric on their own accord.)
Reading Marshall’s post, you’d get the impression that Trump representatives sat back and relaxed throughout the platform-drafting process before springing into action only when an opportunity to help Putin presented itself. That’s demonstrably, unequivocally false.
Even if this had happened — Trump representatives had totally disregarded the GOP platform-drafting process other than to sneak in language related to Ukraine — that might be worth scrutinizing, but not necessarily suggestive of a Russian subversion plot. It’s simply an untrue depiction of the process, though. Trump representatives were deeply involved in other aspects of the platform-drafting process, contrary to Marshall’s assertions.
To reiterate, the central claim on which the thesis of Marshall’s post hinges, is demonstrably, provably false.
There are other problems with Marshall’s post — including the notion that declining to arm Ukraine somehow indicates nefarious intent — but I wanted to narrowly focus on this single falsehood for the time being, because it’s presented by Marshall as such a revelation. Most of the other information about Trump’s deals with myriad oligarchs has been public knowledge for months, if not years. The only new bit was this platform thing. But Marshall’s depiction is now shown to have been false. There you go.
Oh, and the usual disclaimer that has apparently become necessary to append to every discussion of Trump: criticizing the faulty logic, hysterics, and bogus innuendos employed by Trump’s enemies *SHOULD NOT* be construed as any kind of endorsement of Trump. Thanks.
UPDATE: Ukraine was not even the only area of foreign policy in which Trump representatives had “involvement” in crafting platform language. They were involved in at least one other: Israel-Palestine.
