He and his coterie of idiots, nihilists, and opportunists were the perfect prey for Putin’s spell.
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It’s hardly the spycraft of le Carré, or even of Clancy. Even so, the Russians must have been astounded at the ham-fisted ways in which the Trump campaign sought to leverage its relationship with Moscow, and the clumsy attempts to cover its tracks afterward—all of which has made it virtually impossible for the White House, as Trump has conceded, to actually build stronger ties with Russia. Trump has said of the alleged interference in the 2016 election that if Putin “did do it, you wouldn’t have found out about it.” It’s hard to say the same of the Trumps, for whom former C.I.A. director John Brennan’s warning that “frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late” may yet serve a fitting epitaph.
One wonders: are they really that dumb? Are they really so easily manipulated? Perhaps more important, are the Russians really so much better at espionage and counterintelligence that they could successfully infiltrate a presidential campaign, meddle in an American election, and hope to get away with it?
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When I asked Bagley what would have happened had the proverbial tables been turned, he laughed. Everyone knew the answer. Any American suspected by the Soviets of being a mole would have been shot or exiled or locked in a Siberian hole. Just to be safe. The Russians would not have been bothered by things like justice or the truth. They would never have trusted, and this would have made them worse human beings and better spies. This was characterological. It was central to the Russian condition. It was not a result of Sovietism but an enabler of it. It was born of a peasant-like distrust, violence, rot, a bloody, sweaty, mud- and manure-splattered wariness. The Americans were not made this way. They could study the ways of other people, but they could not be them. The best Americans, the ones who grasped the cognitive-cultural oceans separating America and Russia, entered into combat with Moscow with a great chariness. They understood that, when it came to subterfuge, they were at a disadvantage. They tried to inoculate themselves.
All this seems to have been lost on Trump, his retinue of loyalists and hangers-on, and the odd assortment of tertiary characters, like Russian recruitment target Carter Page, who peopled Trump’s campaign. These are not the best Americans. They are nihilists à la Steve Bannon, “idiots” like Page, neophytes like Trump Jr., or opportunists like Manafort. They have acquired, over many months of politicking and quasi-governing, the language of the patriot without understanding what they are saying. Not only that. Their pretend patriotism, their ignorance of American history, its poetries and injustices, its constant existential confrontation with itself, leaves them especially susceptible to the allure of the authoritarian. There is a logic and clarity to the authoritarian, with his shiny toys and Potemkin bullet trains and airport terminals. The authoritarian knows how to put on a good show, and these people love to be dazzled. They are vulnerable to Putin because they admire him while not understanding where he comes from nor who he is. They have no idea whom they are doing combat with. They do not even know that they are engaged in battle, and that the battle is already won.
The ironies are legion. The American, we are often told, is like a child incapable of memory formation, constantly learning and relearning the lessons everyone else has known for centuries. There is something indisputable about this. We have a tendency to believe that it is incumbent upon us to meddle in elections, to prop up opposition movements, to lecture, to scold, to pontificate. But the outsider forgets or does not know that these tendencies, however irksome or maddening, are symptomatic of a belief that we can make the world better. Many awful decisions, most of them having to do with war, have sprung from this belief, but that doesn’t mean we ought to abandon it. Those who are quick to bemoan American hegemony never seem to mention what might replace it: a Pax Sinica? A world devoid of any super- or hyperpowers? Then what? The wars of late will look like playground skirmishes when the Pax Americana ends.
Donald Trump, the first American president ever to abandon our idealism completely, to declare that the United States is now all about cutting deals and not getting screwed by the Iranians nor Democrats, has not made us safer or stronger. That is because our ideals are not fantasies about how we’d like the world to be, but powerful buffers against hostile forces, agents, interlopers. They define us. So long as we know who we are, we also know who we are not. One imagines the 8 (or 10, or 200) people crammed into the conference room in Trump Tower last year, ostensibly talking about adoptions, believed that they were doing what had to be done to beat the Clinton machine, or to drain the swamp; that they were being tough, and breaking someone else’s rules because “that’s politics!”—ignorant, as always, of the depths of their ignorance. They were, of course, wittingly or otherwise, providing the Russians with a beachhead. This is not an exaggeration. The Russians will call it an exaggeration, and they will make many Americans believe that their fellow Americans are overreacting or acting in bad faith, but we should not be swayed by this, because it is disinformation. They are better at this than we are.
- Discussion
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This hits the nail on the head. https://t.co/G6ttDj2lTq
— John Schindler (@20committee) July 21, 2017
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