“I have nothing to do with Russia,” he told reporters on Thursday. “To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”
The denial stands at odds with statements by Russian officials, who have at least twice acknowledged contacts with aides to Mr. Trump before the election.
.. The dispute began two days after the Nov. 8 election, when Sergei A. Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, said his government had maintained contacts with members of Mr. Trump’s “immediate entourage” during the campaign.
.. More recently, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey I. Kislyak, told The Washington Post that he had communicated frequently during the campaign with Michael T. Flynn
.. “This is a nonstory because to the best of our knowledge, no contacts took place, so it’s hard to make a comment on something that never happened,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, said on Monday.
.. The New York Times and other news outlets reported last week that Trump campaign advisers and other associates of Mr. Trump’s had repeated contacts last year with Russian intelligence officials. Those reports, citing anonymous current and former American government officials, were vigorously denied by the White House.
.. On Thursday, Mr. Trump made clear his annoyance when questioned about contacts with Russia.
“How many times do I have to answer this question? Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia,” he said during a White House news conference.
Those Finely Worded Denials Don’t Pass the Smell Test
When Yanukovich found himself in trouble in the uprising against him, Vladimir Putin sent in Russian special forces to rescue him. You don’t do that for just any old guy. Yanukovich says Putin saved his life. Yanukovich is still in Russia, and Putin’s government granted him asylum.
So when Manafort says he has “no connection” to the Russian government, he’s hoping no one remembers his years of service to Putin’s man in Kiev.
This isn’t the first time Manafort has offered a finely-worded denial that left a lot of wiggle room. Back in August, Manafort insisted, “I have never received a single ‘off-the-books cash payment’ as falsely ‘reported’ by The New York Times, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russia.”
As noted above, Manafort had worked for the political party that was running Ukraine, which makes that last bolded part seem like a bit of a dodge. If someone insisted they had never worked for President Obama, but had worked for the Democratic National Committee or Obama for America in 2012, would we have nodded in agreement? In both cases, they’re answering to the president, and it seems reasonable to conclude their viewpoints and interests align.
Rex Tillerson’s State of Denial
ExxonMobil has a long history of peddling misinformation on climate change. Lengthy investigations last year by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News revealed that, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company—then just Exxon—conducted its own extensive research on the subject. Its scientists found that the continued burning of fossil fuels would indeed alter the climate dramatically, and warned that “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.” But instead of considering the possibility of catastrophe—or perhaps in spite of such consideration—the company discontinued its own research efforts and began to try to undermine those of others. Behind the scenes, it attacked the work of government scientists and donated generously to groups that did the same. In public, it promoted the notion that climate change was a matter of debate.
“Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive,” Lee Raymond, the company’s chairman at the time, said in 1997, more than a decade after Exxon’s in-house scientists had concluded just the opposite.
.. ExxonMobil was still contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to groups promoting climate misinformation. These included the American Legislative Exchange Council, which, among other things, advocates teaching climate denial to schoolchildren, and the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which asserts on its Web site, “Actually, there is no sound science to support the claims of Global Warming.” ExxonMobil contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars more to what might be called the country’s most influential denialist group: the Republican majority in Congress.
The Incendiary Appeal of Demagoguery in Our Time
Like Donald Trump, Mr. Modi rose to power demonizing ethnic-religious minorities, immigrants and the establishment media, and boasting about the size of a body part.
.. Arguments over what precisely is to blame for Mr. Trump’s apotheosis —
- inequality,
- callous globalized elites,
- corruptible local legislators,
- zealous ideologues,
- a news media either toxic or complaisant — will only intensify in the coming months.
.. In the case of India, the role of institutional rot — venal legislators, a mendacious media — and the elites’ moral and intellectual truancy is clear. To see it one only has to remember that Mr. Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, was accused of
- supervising mass murder and
- gang rapes of Muslims — and
- consequently was barred from travel to the United States for nearly a decade
— and that none of that prevented him from being elected to India’s highest office.
.. Americans are, as Mr. Frank writes, “a population brought up expecting to enjoy life in what it is often told is the richest country in the world.” In India, one of the poorest countries in the world, “the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite” — to borrow from Ross Douthat, describing America — spawned a much more extravagant sense of entitlement.
.. Suave technocrats, economists and publicists (mostly U.S.-trained) endlessly regurgitated free-market nostrums (imported from America) — what Mr. Frank calls the “liberalism of the rich.”
.. The fervent rhetoric about private wealth-creation and its trickle-down benefits openly mocked, and eventually stigmatized, India’s founding ideals of egalitarian and collective welfare. It is this extraordinary historical reversal, and its slick agents, that must be investigated in order to understand the incendiary appeal of demagoguery in our time.
.. Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book “The Great Transformation” how civil society and individual liberty are threatened as never before when a society has to reconfigure itself to serve the “utopian experiment of a self-regulating market.”
.. In recent years, smooth-tongued “policy entrepreneurs” (Paul Krugman’s term) advocating free-market reforms and a heavily armed security-state have dominated India’s public sphere.
.. Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Mr. Bhagwati’s who now works for the Indian government’s economic policy think-tank, took to arguing that Indian children were genetically underweight, and not really as malnourished as the World Health Organization had claimed. The 2015 Nobel laureate Angus Deaton rightly calls such positions “poverty denialism.”
.. economic growth, of the uneven and jobless kind, was creating what the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have called “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.”
.. All the while they stoked hatred against such enemies of rising India as Kashmiri separatists and their Pakistani supporters.
.. Mr. Modi and his hawkish Twitter account emerged into national politics just as growth faltered
.. “Mein Kampf” is a perennial bestseller in India, Hitler being seen as an exemplary nationalist-cum-people-manager.
.. More important, Mr. Modi grasped then, as astutely as Mr. Trump does now, the terrible political potency of ressentiment. Positioning himself in the gap between the self-righteous beneficiaries of globalization and irascible masses, he claimed to be the son of a modest tea-vendor who had dared to challenge the corrupt old dynasties of quasi-foreign liberals.
.. One of Mr. Modi’s most loyal fan bases was rich Indian-American businesspeople, who were naturally attracted to the promise of a wealthy India allied with the United States.
.. Mr. Trump sought their support, and hailing India’s prime minister as a “great man,”
.. Silicon Valley lined up to hail Mr. Modi’s vision of “Digital India.”
.. B.R. Ambedkar, the main framer of India’s constitution, warned in the 1950s that democracy in India was “only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”
.. India’s press, fearfully self-censoring, if not barefacedly mendacious, has become, as The Economist reported last month, “more craven than Pakistan’s.”
.. Fewer jobs are being created on Mr. Modi’s watch than under the previous government of quasi-foreign liberals.
.. Mr. Modi appears to be an opportunistic manipulator of disaffection with little to offer apart from the pornography of power and a bogus fantasy of machismo. Mr. Trump looks set to follow his lead.
.. In our own time, a global network of elites has tried to restart the discredited utopian experiment of a self-regulating market. The experiment failed, and again the rage of cheated masses has spawned demagogues who simultaneously promise to avenge the left-behinds and to rewire their alliances with the elites.