When absorbing news about the Mueller investigation, I can’t help thinking of Saddam Hussein. No, I’m not equating our president with the late Iraqi dictator. I’m thinking more about our assumptions regarding Saddam’s guilt. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the whole world was asking whether Hussein had a secret WMD program. The head of our CIA said it was a “slam dunk.” Our allies’ intelligence agencies agreed. There were good reasons to think it was true.
.. He sure acts guilty. Let us count some of the ways. He chose Paul Manafort, well known for shady Russia ties, as campaign manager. He picked Carter Page, a wannabee Russian agent, as a campaign foreign-policy adviser. Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort met with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer. The president reportedly dictated a false statement about the meeting when it became public. With the Trump campaign’s approval, Page traveled to Moscow in July 2016. Wikileaks was in touch with Trump Jr. After Michael Flynn, who had failed to disclose his lobbying for Russia and Turkey, was fired for lying to the vice president, Trump asked James Comey to go easy on him. The fact that Flynn lied to the FBI is odd. Why lie? It’s routine for incoming administration officials to have contact with other governments.
Jared Kushner attempted to set up a back channel to communicate with Russia through the Russianembassy. Trump told the Russian ambassador in an Oval Office meeting that he had fired Comey, thereby “relieving great pressure” regarding Russia. Trump resisted sanctions on Russia and, after they passed by veto-proof margins, failed to implement them. Trump suggested, after meeting the Russian leader, that the U.S. and Russia should set up a joint cyber-security effort (causing security experts to spit out their coffee.) He repeatedly said he believed Putin’s denials of election meddling and fretted that he was insulting Putin by asking.
He has obsessed about the Mueller investigation and taken every opportunity to impugn it. He reportedly ordered that Mueller be fired at one point. He colluded with Representative Devin Nunes, talk radio, Fox News, and other sycophants to discredit the FBI.
.. Trump publicly humiliated his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation — as if Sessions were his personal lawyer, but moreover, as if he has something to hide from an investigation into Russian meddling in our election. And there’s more.
.. . It seems perfectly plausible to me that Trump was cultivating his Russia ties during the presidential race because he believed he would lose. He would then monetize this goodwill with business deals (to supplement the large share he already had, his persistent denials notwithstanding).
I Alone Can Fix
But is Twitter really the problem?
.. Twitter is just a tool. With or without it, Trump’s conduct would be disordered and self-sabotaging. The Comey firing is but one of hundreds of examples.
.. The crude way Trump fired Comey — without the courtesy of a meeting or even a phone call — guaranteed a new and skilled enemy.
.. Twitter played no role in Trump’s blurting of classified information to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, or in his choice to slander Comey as a “nut job” to them. Twitter wasn’t implicated in many other blunders, such as undermining the NATO alliance by refusing to confirm our commitment to Article 5; praising the Philippine president for his extrajudicial murders of drug addicts and dealers
.. It is Trump’s inexplicable and insatiable appetite for conflict that keeps roiling the waters.
.. When the city of London has just endured another horrific terror attack, the decent thing is to express American sympathy and solidarity. Trump instead picked a fight with London’s mayor.
.. Trump is feuding with his own staff and even with his family.
.. This is a reprise of a campaign theme, perhaps the chief campaign theme. America, Trump argued, was being led by boobs and incompetents. “I alone can fix.”
.. But the truth is that he is the incompetent, and too vain and insecure to recognize his own faults. When he screws up, he blames those around him.
.. even the best people are diminished and tarnished by what Trump requires of them and does to them.
.. He makes liars of previously honorable men and women.