gracchusdixit

In the days following Donald Trump’s disgraceful “summit” with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, there was, for the first time, widespread and explicit talk of “treason,” not simply from partisan voices on the left, but also from more cautious, mainstream observers.  One even suggested the possibility that Trump may have been a Russian “mole” for decades, recruited in the 1980s when his financial empire was collapsing, he was in desperate need of cash, and no reputable bank was willing to lend him a penny.

A host of former security and diplomatic officials, including many who have been highly critical of Trump, instantly pushed back.  Their argument was a curious one.  They did not try to defend Trump himself but, rather, the canniness of the Russians.  Trump cannot possibly be a Russian agent, they said, because the Russians are too smart to allow one of their agents to expose himself as flagrantly as Trump has done.  On the contrary, the argument goes, the Russians would have done exactly the reverse, ordering Trump to masking his true intentions, pretending to berate Vladimir Putin in public, all the while he was enacting Putin’s agenda in secret.

I do not pretend to have the slightest degree of knowledge about the shadowy world of spies and espionage, but it seems to me that this push-back completely misses the obvious, and, in doing so, illustrates a singular lack of imagination in our thinking about the Trump presidency.  Time after time, we have tied ourselves into knots comparing Trump’s behavior against historical norms and precedents.  As a result, we fail to comprehend the clear and utter abnormality that is staring us in the face.

This particular failure of imagination is the assumption that, for Trump to be useful to Putin, his behavior must be clandestine, as if he were a “spy” in the common sense, sneaking information to his masters covertly, like some character in a novel by Graham Greene or John Le Carré.  Isn’t that the way Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss, and the Cambridge Five all played the game?

But what if that isn’t the game Putin is playing?  What if the part assigned to Trump is to embrace Putin and Russia openly and to convince the American electorate that this embrace is legitimate and just?  What if the goal is not to undermine America’s traditional alliances and commitments one, secret step at a time, but to do so publicly and all at once?  What if the ultimate purpose is for an American president to bow his knee in full view, humiliating not only himself but the United States, and thereby elevating Vladimir Putin on the world stage?

There are a lot of “what if’s” in this theory of the case, of course, but the underlying facts suggest that such a theory is far from implausible.  

Begin with the fact that, after his invasion and subsequent annexation of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin became a global pariah.  Russia was expelled from the G-8; it was subjected to crippling sanctions; and it saw its territorial ambitions hemmed in by the forward deployment of NATO troops and missile systems to Russia’s border in Eastern Europe.  Putin has been desperate to reverse this trajectory.

In addition, the country he leads is a social and economic shipwreck.  Its GDP is smaller than Italy’s.  Other than fossil fuels, minerals, and armaments, it produces nothing the rest of the world has the slightest interest in buying: no cars or trucks, no planes or trains, no industrial machines, no technology or software, not even agricultural goods.  The life expectancy of its citizens is 10 years less than in neighboring Finland; it has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, particularly among men; and every year, thousands upon thousands of Russians simply drink themselves to death.  Such conditions cannot go on forever without eventually endangering Putin’s grip on power.

More important than all of that may be Putin’s own financial vulnerability.  His personal fortune, illegally acquired and by some accounts the largest in the world, is worthless unless it can be converted into hard currency, stashed away in foreign banks, or monetized in the form of foreign assets that have real value.  All these money-laundering avenues have been threatened by the Magnitsky Act, which was passed by the United States Congress in 2012 and allows the financial assets of Putin and the oligarchs who surround him to be frozen or, in some cases, confiscated.  Five other nations have passed similar laws, and more are on the way.

To ward off these assorted threats, to cling to power, to defend himself and the criminal oligarchs who prop up his regime, Putin has resorted to the oldest tricks in the autocrat’s handbook: pugnacious appeals to nationalism, promises to restore national pride by “making Russia great again,” and attacks on those his regime brands as “enemies of the state”—a category that includes journalists, Jews, gays, and anyone who broadly opposes Putin’s conflation of his personal power with the interests of the Russian people.  

That is what Putin’s military build-up is about.  That is what the invasions of the Crimea and Ukraine were about.  That is what the winter Olympics were about.  That is what the World Cup was about.  And that may well be what Putin’s public humiliation of Donald Trump is about.  

For Putin to survive, he must seem to be invincible and victorious.  To sustain that illusion, he must be able to trot out weak, compliant, and defeated foes, dragging them in metaphorical chains behind his metaphorical chariot like some ancient Roman conqueror celebrating a triumph.  Our chump-in-chief is playing his part in this stage play to a tee.  After declining to accept an invitation to visit the White House in the fall, Putin artfully turned the tables and invited Trump to pay homage to him in Moscow, an invitation the White House now seems all too eager to accept.  It truly is even worse than we thought.