gracchusdixit

In 1959, during the darkest days of the Cold War, a man named Richard Condon wrote a best-selling potboiler called The Manchurian Candidate.  Its premise was that the offspring of one of our country’s most prominent political and social families, having been captured by the Communist Chinese during the Korean War, was brainwashed and sent back to the United States, programmed, as it were, to assassinate and replace the likely winner of a Presidential election.  Condon’s idea was far-fetched, even in that paranoid era, but that did not prevent Hollywood from turning his book into a hit movie, not once but twice, proving yet again that a preposterous plot has never stopped the American public from buying movie tickets.

Preposterous “conspiracy theories” have long been a feature, not only of our movie-going and television-watching lives, but of our political life.  They usually come from the craziest corner of the political right, where fear, suspicion, and paranoia seem to have found a particularly congenial home.  The dystopian fantasies from that end of the spectrum include such notions as: Lyndon Johnson caused the assassination of JFK; Bill and Hillary Clinton arranged the murder of Vince Foster, one of their dearest friends; the federal government has built a series of underground concentration camps beneath abandoned Walmart stores, where it intends to incarcerate gun owners once they’ve been stripped of their weapons and rounded up; the federal government is—for reasons never made entirely clear—also hiding aliens from outer space in a bleak, top-secret patch of the Nevada desert called “Area 51;” and last, but certainly not least, President Barack Obama is a Muslim mole snuck into the country to undermine the “American way of life” and impose Sharia law on our God-fearing, Christian nation.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as the feverish fantasizing of people who have nothing better to do but read—or worse yet—believe the rubbish published by tabloid rags like The National Inquirer.  Indeed, it is tempting to dismiss the entire genre of “conspiracy theories” as utter and preposterous nonsense.

In the last few days, however, we have been presented with a different sort of conspiracy theory—one that emanates, not from the political right, but from the left,  and, as crazy as it seems, may actually be true.

On the eve of its Presidential convention, the computer system of the Democratic National Committee was hacked, and thousands of its emails were leaked.  They revealed that senior DNC staffers had been deliberately trying to derail the campaign of Bernie Sanders, a show of partisanship that was beyond the pale.  This revelation did not alter the outcome of the convention or derail the nomination of Hillary Clinton.  Nonetheless, it proved so embarrassing that the head of the DNC, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, was forced to step down.

Within hours, top security and intelligence officials had concluded that there was “little doubt” the Russians were behind both the hack and the leak, although these officials stopped short of absolute confirmation.  If they ultimately prove to be right, we will know that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is trying to manipulate the outcome of our Presidential election.  The only possible purpose of such a plot would be to ensure the election of Donald Trump.

How did Trump himself respond to all this?  Instead of condemning the Russians, he egged them on, encouraging them to do more, to go directly after his opponent: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.  I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Never in the history of our Republic has a Presidential candidate of either party called upon a foreign power, let alone a hostile and aggressive foreign power controlled by a ruthless dictator, to interfere with an American election.

Whether this call constitutes a crime or even treason, is up to others to decide.  But it was not an anomalous first episode.  It was not an accidental slip of the tongue. It was not a mere gaff, triggered by the heat of the moment.  It was part of a pattern.

Donald Trump has been flirting with Vladimir Putin—some might even say dancing to his strings—for quite some time.  When Putin called Trump a “very talented man,” Trump preened and genuflected simultaneously: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”  Trump has repeatedly asserted that Putin is somehow preferable to the democratically elected President of the United States: “He’s a better leader than Obama, because Obama is not a leader.”  He has also suggested that Putin’s respect is worthy of cultivation: “He has a total lack of respect for President Obama.  Number one, he doesn’t like him.  And number two, he doesn’t respect him.  I think he’s going to respect your President, if I am elected.  And I hope he likes me.”

Let us be clear.  Vladimir Putin may—or may not—be respected within his own country, but he doesn’t command a scintilla of respect anywhere else in the world.  He is a former KGB thug, a criminal, and a vicious dictator.  If he is, to use one of Donald Trump’s favorite words, “strong,” he is also wrong, on every level, about everything.  To defend such a man, let alone bask in his praise, is to betray everything it means to be an American.

How can we explain the bizarre and frightening phenomenon of an American Presidential candidate relishing the approval of a criminal dictator who embodies everything we, as a nation, are called upon to oppose?

There are only two possibilities.  One is that Donald Trump is a feeble and narcissistic fool who will do anything and cultivate anyone to reinforce his precarious sense of self-esteem and shore up his ego.  The other, far more dangerous, possibility is that he is indebted, quite literally, to Vladimir Putin.

Let us consider the second possibility.

Trump’s campaign manager is a man named Paul Manafort.  Manafort is a lobbyist who has become stupendously rich by advancing the interests of many of the world’s most corrupt political and business figures.  They include numerous Russian “oligarchs,” the notorious Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency, the one-time dictator of the Philippines, and the former President of Ukraine who was, until ousted by own people, a puppet of Vladimir Putin.    Thanks to Manafort, the platform that emerged from the Republican Convention in Cleveland is stuffed with proposals that will benefit his clients, Russia and Putin most of all.

And there you have it: a party and its Manchurian candidate, determined to benefit Vladimir Putin’s Russia at the expense of the United States of America.  Whether Donald Trump is personally culpable, or merely a dupe, we will probably never know.  What we do know is this: if we elect this man, there will be no turning back.