by David Frum
And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.”
The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.
According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.21
The Obama administration observed increasingly assertive Russian attacks on European political systems as early as 2014. For reasons we will learn from the memoirs its members write, the Obama administration hesitated to respond. Was it to protect its Iran diplomacy? A hope it could mollify Russia into ending aggression against Ukraine? A more general aversion to forceful foreign policy? Overconfidence in the robustness of democratic political systems, including its own? Whatever the motive, the results are as we have seen: warnings were issued to Russia, but no action was taken during the election, and only very limited penalties applied afterward, most notably the seizure of two Russian diplomatic compounds.
By then it was too late. A president beholden to Russia had been installed in the Oval Office: the most successful foreign espionage attempt against the United States in the nation’s history. And from beginning to end, the president’s political party rallied to protect him—and itself—from investigation, exposure, and consequences.
“I’ll be the first one to come out and point to Russia if there’s clear evidence,” declared House intelligence chair Devin Nunes in December 2016.22 Instead, over the following months, Nunes actively collaborated with the Trump White House to sabotage his committee’s investigation, to the point where he was forced to recuse himself from further involvement. House Speaker Ryan issued multiple statements viewing Russia’s behavior with alarm in 2016. But Ryan took a firm stance from the beginning against anybody digging too deep into what had happened. “As we work to protect our democracy from foreign influence,” Ryan said in a written statement of December 12, 2016, “we should not cast doubt on the clear and decisive outcome of this election.”23 When in June 2017 the Senate voted 97–2 to limit President Trump’s ability to lift sanctions on Russia, Ryan whipped votes in the House to block the measure.24 (An amended version of the June sanctions bill did pass both houses at the end of July and was signed by President Trump in August.25 The sanctions remained unimplemented as of November 1, 2017.)
Even supposed Russia hawks like Senator Marco Rubio came to Trump’s aid when it counted. At the June 8, 2017, public hearing for the fired FBI director James Comey, Rubio used his public airtime to try to extract admissions that would discredit Comey and exculpate the president. Remember, Trump himself had acknowledged in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on May 11 that he had fired Comey precisely in order to put an end to the “made-up story” that Russia helped him win the election. Trump’s motive for firing Comey was no longer a matter in dispute. Yet it was Rubio more than any other senator on the committee who endeavored to distract from that undisputed fact.
Rubio: But the specific ask was that you would tell the American people what you had already told him, what you had already told the leaders of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans: that he was not personally under investigation. . . .
Comey: Yes, sir, that’s how I . . .
Rubio: In fact, he was asking you to do what you have done here today. . . .
Rubio: So, in essence, the president agreed with your statement that it would be great if we could have an investigation, all the facts came out and we found nothing. So he agreed that that would be ideal, but this cloud is still messing up my ability to do the rest of my agenda.
Rubio: So are those the other—are those the only two instances in which that sort of back-and-forth happened, where the president was basically saying, and I’m paraphrasing here, it’s OK, do the Russia investigation. I hope it all comes out. I have nothing to do with anything Russia. It’d be great if it all came out, if people around me were doing things that were wrong.
Rubio: You know, this investigation is full of leaks, left and right. I mean, we’ve learned more from the newspapers sometimes than we do from our open hearings, for sure. You ever wonder why, of all the things in this investigation, the only thing that’s never been leaked is the fact that the president was not personally under investigation, despite the fact that both Democrats and Republicans in the leadership of Congress knew that, and have known that for weeks?26
That last sentence, it should be noted, was the single most often heard pro-Trump talking point of the period. Rubio dutifully reprised it for the watching world.
The truth outed, as truth tends to do, especially with Trump’s stumblebum crew. The line written into the script of All the President’s Men about Watergate applies even more forcefully to the Trump family and its entourage: “The truth is, these aren’t very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” But it is also true that the wrong actions of Donald Trump and his family were protected before the fact, and condoned after the fact, by the larger Republican and conservative world. I jokingly tweeted at the end of May that after all the excuses condoning Greg Gianforte’s assault on Ben Jacobs, we would next be called on to explain why treason is bad.27 That joke all too quickly proved prophetic.
Geraldo Rivera opened the excuse making on the May 10, 2017, Hannity show.
If the Russian KGB chief is talking to Paul Manafort and the chief says, “You know, I’ve got this dirt here that says Hillary Clinton was this or that,” and Paul Manafort says, “Next Wednesday, why don’t you release that, that’d be great for us.” That’s not—I don’t know that that’s a crime at all. What’s the crime?28
In a conversation with me on the May 21, 2017, edition of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, the pro-Trump author Ronald Kessler said, “There’s no violation of law if, in fact, the campaign colluded with Russia, whatever that means.”29 The conservative radio host Michael Reagan said the same thing in a CNN discussion on May 31: “Collusion is not breaking the law.”30
On his June 22, 2017, television program, Sean Hannity and former Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed that it would be a positive benefit to the United States if Trump had worked with the Russians against Hillary Clinton. “If I worked for President Trump and his campaign, and I thought the Russians had information that would expose Hillary for being a liar, and I said, ‘Could you release that?’ Is that a crime?”31
Hannity returned to the theme on his radio program the next day:
What was the collusion? That maybe somebody in the Trump campaign talked to somebody in Russia because Russia supposedly had the information that Hillary Clinton had destroyed on her server when she committed a felony and tried to cover up her crimes? Is that a crime, to say, “Release it?” To show the truth? To show damaging information?32
The former Fox anchor Brit Hume similarly absolved the Trump campaign on the June 25 Fox News Sunday. “While it obviously would be alarming and highly inappropriate for the Trump campaign to—of which there’s no evidence, by the way, of colluding with the Russians—it’s not a crime.”33 Some went further still, wondering why anybody need worry about Russia at all. “The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does,” tweeted the radio host Dennis Prager on July 14, 2017.34
Whether collusion with a Russian espionage agency would violate US election laws raises complex issues of legal interpretation. The national security implications, however, are straightforward and grim. A candidate who had received help from
a hostile foreign power would depend hugely on that power’s goodwill. What if they released evidence against him? They could wreck his presidency, provoke an impeachment crisis, possibly send him to prison. He would have to govern himself very circumspectly, even at political risk to himself at home. Collusion between a US president and a hostile foreign power would constitute the gravest espionage crisis in American history—and one of its blackest pages of treason.
The below timeline of relevant events was compiled by NBC News, abridged by me with some interpolations in bold type.
June 9, 2016: Donald Trump Jr.—along with Jared Kushner and Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort—meet with the Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
June 9: Trump tweets for the first time about Clinton’s missing 33,000 emails.
July 18: The Washington Post reports on the first day of the GOP convention that the Trump campaign changed the Republican platform to ensure that it didn’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.
July 21: Trump gives an interview to David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times in which he repeatedly refuses to commit to defending NATO’s Baltic allies Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia against Russia.
July 22: WikiLeaks releases emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
July 27: In the final news conference of his 2016 campaign, Trump tells Russia: “If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.”
August 4: Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, confronts his Russian counterpart about Russia’s interference.
October 4: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange says his organization will publish emails related to the 2016 campaign.
October 7: The Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence release a statement directly saying that Russia is interfering in the 2016 election.
October 7: The Washington Post reports the Access Hollywood video.
October 7: WikiLeaks begins releasing emails stolen from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, less than one hour after the Washington Post report.
October 31: “This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove,” Trump says on the campaign trail.
November 4: “Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks,” Trump says from Ohio.35
All this may be coincidence, a sequence of misunderstandings. But it does not look good for the integrity of the American political system. The authoritarians of older times abolished elections altogether or falsified them so outrageously as to render them meaningless. Modern authoritarian states do not so explicitly renounce the democratic idea. Even Vladimir Putin’s Russia has elections in which millions of people vote, and it’s not at all obvious that Putin cheats very much in the counting of that vote. In the Russian parliamentary elections of September 2016, Vladimir Putin’s party won a perfectly plausible 54 percent of the vote, on the basis of a turnout that the regime candidly described as the lowest since the end of communism.36 In Putin’s system, if you have to cheat in the vote counting, you’ve left things far too late. And Putin’s is the most repressive of the world’s de-democratizing states. The others—places such as Hungary, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, and so on—distort the election processes even less, although just enough to preclude unwelcome results.
In modern authoritarian states, unapproved candidates are deterred from running; disfavored people are discouraged from voting. Votes may be counted honestly enough, but voting systems are tilted in favor of the party of the leader. In the Hungarian elections of 2014, for example, the party of the prime minister won 133 out of 199 parliamentary seats, with only 44.9 percent of the vote. In such states, state resources are directed in ways that support the party of the leader. State-owned and state-influenced media spread disinformation and defamation about opponents. Rather than discuss issues, ethnic grievances are stoked—and when outsiders report on what is happening, the regime exploits the opportunity to denounce a hostile external world for defaming the nation.
Americans regard their democracy as beyond comparison to such sad international cases. Yet here too the democratic system was and is harshly contested. The right of all adult citizens to vote is no longer seriously debated by Americans, but the universal ability to vote seems to encounter new obstacles with every passing year. If Donald Trump entrenches himself in power, those obstacles will rise higher and proliferate more numerously across the American political landscape.
The fear that the younger Donald Trump inserted into Tocqueville’s mouth—that a democracy can last only until citizens discover they can vote themselves benefits—actually originated nearer to home. “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result that democracy collapses.” Those oft-quoted words, also sometimes attributed to Aristotle and Thomas Babington Macaulay, seem to have originated in a 1951 op-ed in the Daily Oklahoman by a retired Wisconsin state senator.37 What’s interesting about those words is not how prescient they are, but really how opposite to the truth.
In the United States as in other countries, the great threat to constitutional democracy has not been the demands for largesse by the many, but the fears for their property of the few. The most successful antidemocratic movement in American history—the reduction of voting rights after Reconstruction—was intended precisely to thwart local majorities voting themselves such benefits as schooling and paying for it by higher taxes on the rich. The rollback worked too. Only 50,752 ballots were cast by the 1.7 million people of South Carolina in the election of 1924, half as many as cast by 700,000 South Carolinians in 1872. (Connecticut, with 300,000 fewer people than South Carolina in 1924, cast eight times as many votes).
Now in the 2010s, the integrity of American democracy is challenged again—and again the challenge is backed by threats of armed violence. In June 2017, a rumor spread via Facebook that protesters planned to rally at a park in Houston, Texas, to demand the removal of a statue of Sam Houston. Hundreds of supporters of the statue rallied, a large number of them carrying rifles, some wearing body armor.
Hermann Park, the site of the Sam Houston statue, is one of the city of Houston’s most visited parks. The Houston Zoo is located within it; the Children’s Museum of Houston stands just a few blocks away. On weekends, the park is typically crowded with young families. Yet some dozens of Texans decided that this would be an appropriate place to plan a gunfight. And of course they were entirely within their rights, as those rights are understood in twenty-first-century America. Texas law forbids citizens to carry deadly weapons “in a manner calculated to alarm.” Otherwise, long arms may be shouldered by virtually anyone in almost any place. It might be thought that bringing a rifle into a playground is itself “calculated to alarm.” But over the past generation, gun carriers have become much more assertive and the authorities much more accommodating.
Gun carriers at the so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 acted more like a paramilitary force than as individual demonstrators. They wore pseudo-military outfits, including body armor. They took tactical formations to surround the site of the expected confrontation—although when murder was done, it was done ISIS-style, by ramming a car into a crowd of demonstrators.
The City Council of San Antonio, Texas, met in August 2017 to debate removal of a Confederate monument from that city’s Travis Park. Ten men bearing assault rifles and wearing Kevlar vests took positions outside the council’s chambers.38
The open display of military-style weapons at public meetings is not an ancient right cherished by Americans through the centuries. “Among free men,” Abraham Lincoln famously wrote, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such an appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.”39 Yet just such a threat is wha
t is being issued in Houston and Charlottesville and San Antonio—and more places yet to come.
The following happened in Loudoun County, Virginia, on Election Day 2016.
A man wearing a Donald Trump shirt and carrying a weapon stood outside a voting location in Loudoun County, Virginia. . . . “I had my 9-year-old son with me. I felt intimidated,” [Erika] Cotti said. “And I had to explain to my 9-year-old why a man with a 357 magnum is standing outside the polling station.”
Cotti said the man offered her a Republican sample ballot, which she declined.
“He’s like, ‘Who are you going to vote for, crooked Hillary?’ And I was like, ‘That’s really none of your business,’” Cotti said, adding that the man was standing in the sidewalk outside of the office when they left and blocking their path.40
Will there be more such incidents in 2018 and 2020? It’s all quite legal. In many Americans’ minds, the right to carry arms is now the master right of American law, to which all other rights must yield. In 1994, the average gun-owning household owned four weapons; by 2015, the average gun-owning household owned eight.41
At a press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower two days after the violence in Charlottesville, Trump channeled the feelings of the men who carried guns to prevent an elected government from putting lawful decisions into effect. “You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”42 (The new name to which Trump objected was “Emancipation Park.”) A week later still, at an August 22, 2017, rally in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump again identified himself with those defending Confederate monuments by force of arms: “Yes, by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our heritage. You see that.”43