The surreal world

Vladimir Putin has his own version of reality. And President Trump believes it.
After more than two hours in private Monday at their summit in Helsinki, President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin indulged in some of their favorite conspiracy theories.
  • Trump spoke of “the Pakistani gentleman,” echoing false right-wing media reports about a Democratic IT worker,
  • and reprised the debunked theory that the Democratic National Committee withheld its servers — and critical information — from law enforcement.
  • Putin went down the George-Soros-as-puppet-master rabbit hole and claimed, falsely, that a London-based antagonist of his had given Hillary Clinton $400 million.

Predictably, the two agreed that the narrative of Russian meddling in the 2016 election — supported by a body of evidence that seems to swell by the day — could not possibly be true because, as Trump said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” (Of course, he insisted the next day that he’d meant to say the exact opposite.) Putin gave Trump a soccer ball commemorating the World Cup, but the two may as well have exchanged tinfoil hats.

.. After years of churning out fabulist explanations for Russian actions that always exonerate the Russian government, the Kremlin has finally found a willing audience for Putin’s version of reality: the leader of the free world.

Putin’s government has long insisted that its actions are not to blame for the sad state of the Russian-American relationship — not

  1. Russia’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, not
  2. its annexation of Crimea, not
  3. the war in eastern Ukraine, not
  4. the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the deaths of the 298 people on board, not
  5. the indiscriminate bombing of Syrian cities and targeted strikes on aid convoys trying to help them,
  6. not the support for far-right candidates in Europe. And certainly not
  7. the hacking of the U.S. presidential election in order to kneecap Hillary Clinton and boost Trump.
.. Whenever he is confronted with these allegations, Putin demands proof. When he is given proof, he claims it’s fake. Anything that proves him to be at fault is publicly labeled a provocation — Russian for “fake news” — and anything that proves him innocent is truth, no matter how baffling, bizarre or downright impossible.

And now, the Kremlin has a U.S. president whose understanding of truth aligns so well with the Russian one that it’s become increasingly difficult to tell them apart.

.. Other presidents have responded by either rebuking and lecturing Putin (as George W. Bush did in 2005) or simply waiting out the tirades from Putin and his foreign minister at the start of every meeting and phone call, a ritual that Obama officials called, derisively, “the airing of grievances.”
.. So the most significant victory for Putin is that he finally has a partner in the White House who believes his version of events without having to be convinced. Putin has been playing a game of epistemological chicken with the United States, and finally, the United States, in the person of Trump, has blinked.
.. Who needs to air grievances when you agree on them?
.. To Russian observers, it seemed like nothing else really happened at the summit. No agreement was signed, and apparently, no issue of substance was discussed: not Syria, not Ukraine, not human rights.
.. the day after the summit, the Russian mission to the United Nations issued a tweet asserting disproven information about the MH17 disaster. The Kremlin was clearly feeling good about its truth.
.. “We were right about everything all along, and all we needed was some patience for everyone else to realize it,” Moscow political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann says of how this turn of events is perceived in Russia. “Life is just a string of confirmation of our wisdom and vision. You just need to see it the right way.”
.. This isn’t an academic question of interpretation. Seeing it the right way — or the wrong way — has real policy implications. If America is at fault for everything that’s gone wrong in its relationship with Russia, as Trump seems to agree, then why do we impose sanctions on Russian officials and companies? This has been Russia’s position all along. Even before Trump’s inauguration, his then-national security adviser Michael Flynn was planning on unwinding Russia sanctions unilaterally. This suited the Russians just fine. In public statements, the Kremlin made clear that sanctions imposed by Washington could be undone only by Washington; Russia had absolutely nothing to do with it.
You imposed the sanctions for no reason, the logic went; you remove them for no reason. To do anything else would be to admit fault, and this is something Putin, the consummate zero-sum man, does not do. It shows weakness, it paves the way to defeat.
.. As Putin put it Monday: “Yes, I did [want Trump to win]. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.” He meant, of course, what Russia defines as normal. After Helsinki, it’s clear that Trump’s definition is just about the same.