Get Him Out
Take at look at this list from Max Boot of 18 compelling reasons why Trump “may” be a Russian asset:
Perhaps there are space limitations and that’s why conservative Boot lists *only* 18 reasons, in his otherwise good summary piece above. Here’s some of what Boot omits/doesn’t give sufficient discussion of:
1. Like no president ever, Trump routinely attacks the press and openly contemplates setting up a government-run propaganda arm (but since he has Fox, why bother).
2. Had Flynn speak with Russian ambassador Kislyak five times on December 29, 2016 to reassure him about the sanctions on Russia, then repeatedly lied about those contacts and his/Pence’s/everyone’s knowledge of those contacts.
3. Boot collapses the Trump campaign’s 101 known contacts with Russia into a single (his fourth) bullet point, so maybe my no. 2 above is subsumed in that, but that’s part of the problem with Boot’s otherwise good summary. Reducing these contacts and their contents to a mere statistic, however large, isn’t sufficient to capture the extent of the contacts, the willfulness, the deliberation, the knowingness, the dangers, the risks, and the not giving a damn about national security or U.S. law or U.S. alliances that these contacts signify. The evidence that Trump is an asset is there before our eyes in the content and timing and overwhelming number of those very contents. It was there before our eyes in 2016 — anyone who cared about U.S. national security would have criticized Putin’s attack on the election and pledged to investigate it and stop future attacks, but instead, Trump denied it even while embraced it and using its fruits for his own benefit.
4. Also collapsed into Boot’s fourth bullet point is Trump and his team’s cover ups of and lies about their contacts with Russia. Again, the summary does a disservice by not separating this out as a major piece of evidence or going into any details about the lies. Specifically, Trump has dismissed both the fact of the Russian attack as a hoax and the investigation into the Russian attack on our country as a hoax, minimizing and ignoring the threat to our national security in violation of his oath of office. Lie upon lie upon lie to the public by Trump and his minions, denials of each and every contact until the reporting becomes overwhelming or the indictments confirm them, and then dismissing each one as irrelevant or so-whatting it or lying that there was never any denial, and attacking those who expose the lies.
5. Trump refused to condemn in any meaningful way the white supremacist activity in Charlottesville and elsewhere; he only said something after a massive uproar and then did so woodenly and without any conviction. This has largely been seen as his natural affinity for white supremacy because he is a racist, but what if we put this in context with Putin’s known support of and stoking neo-Nazi and far-right, white supremacy groups across Europe for the purpose of destabilizing Western democracy? Has any modern president normalized and refused to condemn or discourage white racial hatred and anti-Semitism in favor of violence and fascism the way Trump has? This is behavior that breaks down democratic societies and exactly what Putin wants to see, both here and all across Europe. It dovetails with both Trump’s and Putin’s support for such movements and “leaders” across Europe.
6. In addition to Trump’s unprecedented and shocking attacks on the FBI, the Justice Department, and other U.S. intelligence agencies, he has ensured that, other than Rosenstein, every high-ranking person in either the FBI or DOJ who was involved in opening and pursuing the counter-intelligence investigation into Trump has been publicly humiliated and fired, their decades of public service trashed and their careers and reputations smeared if not destroyed. In other words, a la Putin, the apparatus of the state has been deployed not to protect the U.S. and national security, but to protect Trump personally and ruin whoever gets in his way as part of his ongoing effort to undermine the Russia investigation.
7. Trump destablizes the U.S.government and its ability to function in manifold ways all reminiscent of Putin himself, most notably stocking the government with corrupt self-serving stooges and self-promoters hell-bent on kleptocracy, which undermines out ability to compete in the world, care for our people, defend against threats, or achieve internal stability — just like Putin does. Trump need not be in Putin’s pocket to be an asset; the mere fact that he aspires to be, and acts like, a third rate petty oligarch who sees the the government as a personal piggybank and scam possibility to line his and his family’s coffers in hundreds of two-bit ways, undermines the foundation of a democratic government. Every day, every hour, that Trump violates the Constitution, as he has since his inauguration, is another notch in Putin’s belt.
8. While correctly noting that Trump was “utterly supine” in meetings with Putin and that Trump chose to accept Putin’s denials of his attacks on the U.S. election (which Boot irritatingly understates as “meddling”) over the consensus conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community, Boot does not focus on Trump’s extraordinary public display of abasement before Putin, before an international audience, with a U.S. president abjectly accepting the self-serving and preposterous denials of the very adversary who attacked us over the findings of the U.S. government. He did that in front of the entire world.
9. Trump was personally involved in crafting Donald Jr.’s false and ever-shifting denials of the June 9, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, and the timing of that obstruction dovetails with Trump asking for, and receiving, a one-on-one secret meeting, the record of which is entirely in Putin’s hands.
10. Holding meetings with Putin and/or his lapdogs from which the American press or American translators were barred, while Russian press or translators were present — and compromising national security in the process.
11. Openly contemplating a pretextual declaration of “emergency” in order to arrogate power to himself and act in ways that would otherwise be prohibited, and thus to illegally redeploy funds that only Congress can appropriate, to erect a xenophobic and fascist symbol reminiscent of East Germany, and, in the process, redirecting taxpayer funds from activities necessary for our domestic security to actions that undermine it.
Democracy doesn’t just die in darkness. It apparently dies in plain sight, by a thousand small cuts, as a corrupted and complicit GOP watches, pretending its hands are tied, or, worse, actively assisting.
Removing this man from office, immediately, is a national security imperative. Every person who has taken an oath to defend this country from all enemies, including domestic ones, should be working together to secure his removal. We should be talking about nothing else, and demanding nothing less.
