Trump Is Colluding With Russia
There’s a striking myth that when Columbus arrived in the New World, the natives were incapable of seeing his ships. The ships were so far outside their experience, the story goes, that the natives could not even comprehend their existence.
We are now all living in that myth.
I’ll admit it: I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with the single astonishing fact that should be shadowing all American politics right now: our president-elect has betrayed our democracy to a foreign power.
But this conspiracy is being covered up — not by its brazen, incompetent perpetrators, but by everyone else, blinded by the strangeness of what they’re witnessing. Because of this, the idea has spent months lurking at the edges of public discussion. Finally — maybe too late to matter — it has begun to surface for all to see.
It’s reminiscent of nothing more than the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003, throughout which it was obvious that Bush and company were stacking lie on top of lie. The rationale for the war kept changing. The hard evidence of WMDs never surfaced — our spies always said they knew where the WMDs had been days or weeks earlier, but never knew where they were at the present moment. Saddam Hussein’s alleged intransigence made no sense in light of the clearly impending invasion. Most of all, anyone paying attention to rhetoric about Iraq knew the first murmurs of war had sprung up in connection to 9/11 — but only many months after the parties actually responsible for 9/11 had been well-identified.
I was 17 at the time. I can’t have been the only person to notice these things. And yet, everywhere I looked, people were ignoring the overwhelming pattern in front of them. Instead of asking why the rationales for war kept changing, people focused on each in turn, confining their debates to narrow, approachable questions. Rather than asking why Hussein or Bush were behaving the way they were, people focused on the day-to-day politics of the push to war. Patterns that seemed clear from a bird’s eye view were instead placed under a microscope, where they became invisible.
I’m not a psychologist so I can only speculate as to what was happening. But ever since, I’ve felt there’s no truer fable than the story of the emperor’s new clothes. People — even brilliant, powerful people — would rather be wrong in a crowd than be right in isolation. In politics and media, sounding reasonable is more important than actual reasoning — even in the face of clear evidence. Being wrong is okay, as long as it’s only because you claimed everything is normal.
And here we are again. The facts are clear, and should have been front and center all along: it’s been obvious since at least the summer that Trump or his camp was working in some fashion with Russia. This is the most significant political scandal in modern American history — the highest office of the land coopted by an explicitly hostile foreign power, an autocratic regime which would like nothing more than the collapse of our system of government.
What more do you need? The evidence is voluminous. They’re barely trying to hide it; it’s everywhere you look.
The litany of evidence shouldn’t need to be reviewed. But even today, discussions of Trump and Russia look at his positions on hacking, or the role of his advisors, or his tweets since the election — rarely the big picture. It’s the same old Iraq War play: pull out the microscope, ditch the broad view. But it’s the big picture that shows us a pattern with only one real explanation. So here we go:
Donald Trump has spent years insulting everyone in America — friends and enemies alike — but has never levied a real criticism at Vladimir Putin. Instead, he unfailingly defends Russia from the accusations of his own Congress and own security apparatus at every turn. This remains his only consistent policy position.
He brags about his appeal to the nation and its leader. He laughs off the idea of sanctions.
Trump has surrounded himself with Russophilic advisors — hard to find in the GOP! — including men who have received direct financial support from the country and worked with it to undermine Western interests.
The strangest example of this, mostly met with confusion, was the completely inexplicable elevation of a House backbencher named Dana Rohrabacher to the shortlist for Secretary of State. Rohrabacher is known for exactly one thing: fawning obsequiousness towards Vladimir Putin.
Trump appears to have significant financial connections with Russia, which he nonetheless denies vociferously, while refusing, under false pretenses, to release the one document that could help prove otherwise.
During the RNC, Trump’s team — which to that moment had never expressed a detailed policy preference — inexplicably made obscure changes to the party’s platform with regard to Ukraine, and then denied its role in having done so.
Trump has continually cast doubt on the stability of NATO, undermining the main military obstacle to Russian expansionism. Trump is now also seeking the dissolution of the EU, too, undoing seventy years of postwar progress towards a stable and united Europe.
Before the election his Russian-friendly advisor Roger Stone predicted that the Russian-affiliated Wikileaks would soon target John Podesta, which they did, days later. Wikileaks has spent the months since the election attacking Trump’s enemies.
RT, Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, has consistently defended Trump. They pushed, and continued to push, the toxic mix of far-right and far-left conspiracy theory that invigorates both Trump’s fascist base and the left-wing opposition that continues to weigh on mainstream liberalism. They recently argued that he should “decapitate” the intelligence agencies after rumors of collusion began spreading.
Last year, Trump’s National Security Advisor flew to Moscow to celebrate that propaganda network, where he sat at a table with Vladimir Putin and Jill Stein, the main left-wing alternative to Hillary Clinton.
Immediately after the election, gloating Russian diplomats bragged about being in touch with Trump’s team — then quickly retracted their statement.
The collusion was easy to see long before anyone was talking about it out loud. And now, we know that for at least the past six months, concrete, verifiable allegations of collusion have been floating around the political, media, and security communities.
Every other issue pales next to this one. It’s Watergate times one hundred; it should be leading every paper, and waves of panic should be cresting in Congress and at the Pentagon. Not only does it mean our democracy has been compromised as never before, but it risks destabilizing the international order. This prospect is especially alarming with regard to Russia itself, the only other nation with the capacity to wage apocalyptic nuclear war. For all the alarm over nukes in Iran and China, only two nations have a stockpile able to eliminate large swathes of the planet in hours — two nations now linked by an unstable, poorly-understood, politically explosive covert bond.
And yet, still, many still respond with skepticism and disbelief, imploring us to focus on “the real issues,” whatever they may be. The underlying message: “It’s too crazy to be true.” Newspapers publish carefully circumscribed reports about “potential links”: a phone call here, an advisor there. The greatest conspiracy in modern American history, lying barely out of sight, is mentioned in innuendo, if at all.
I’ve spent years of my life studying history, and let me say: history is replete with things that were too crazy to be true, until they actually happened. You can’t tell what’s going on around you by assuming it’s a variation of what’s happened before. In the end, I think you need to trust your eyes and trust the evidence, not the consensus about what is and is not reasonable. Fear of being wrong in isolation can’t govern our willingness to point out obvious truths.
Most of us don’t have wiretaps or intelligence dossiers at our disposal. But that shouldn’t prevent us from looking at a pattern and saying what we see. The emperor has no clothes: Trump is working with Russia.