SOMEONE'S GOT IT IN FOR ME, THEY'RE PLANTING STORIES IN THE PRESS
My friend Corinne asks this about Donald Trump: “What if he is the "useful idiot"? Suppose he didn't actually know that he was being used as a tool by Russia? Manafort knew, Flynn knew, Stone knew, Page knew. Sessions knew but hid his head in the sand. Bannon probably knew but didn't care because Trump was a useful idiot for him, too. The youngsters didn’t know they were being manipulated but liked feeling important. Putin used the greedy people to bring in the stupid people and that includes Trump. Is it an impeachable offense to be a useful idiot?”
Good question. Here’s my theory. I think that “useful idiot” is exactly the way Vladimir Putin thinks about Donald Trump. That’s why they recruited him in the first place, a decade or more ago.
Trump spent most of his adult life losing money on his real estate projects; his major achievement as a business man was to figure out how to profit from his multiple bankruptcies and leave his unlucky investors and business partners holding the bag. But eventually, American banks refused to loan him money. He had to look overseas for financing.
I recommend a Slate/Jacob Weisberg podcast (link below) for an explanation of how Trump transitioned from a failed hotelier/casino magnate to a prosperous life of letting Russian oligarchs, use his casinos and construction projects to launder money in return for a piece of the action.
Money laundering was Trump’s entry level job as a useful idiot. He had to have known that was happening, because the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City was charged with 106 counts of money laundering in the 1990s. Typically, Trump paid his fine (the largest such fine any casino had ever paid up to that point) without admitting liability. Trump obviously believed that rules were meant to be broken, as long as the profits exceeded the fines.
And that’s how the Trump-Russia connection began. Trump was just another half-bright New York businessman who thought he could make some easy money by working with the mob. Only in Trump’s case, it was the Russian Mafiya, and they were intimately connected to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
It seems clear that something happened in Moscow during Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in 2013 that gave Putin additional leverage over The Donald. The (as yet unverified) version of those events that makes the most sense to me is that the Russians have compromising video on Trump, which likely did NOT involve urine, but probably involved underage girls. There’s no reason to believe that Putin saw Trump as a future president. More likely, he was just following the KGB script, gathering kompromat and putting it aside in case it might come in handy someday.
Then Trump decided to run for president, and things got complicated. The evidence I’ve seen suggests that most of Trump’s inner circle (especially Flynn and Manafort) had their own connections to Russia, and their own agendas for Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump is famously not a detail guy, and it’s entirely plausible that he failed to understand the import of some of their machinations.
I’d be willing to believe that he was ignorant of the details of Flynn’s work with Turkey, for instance, or Manafort’s plan to use his access to Trump to get back on the good side of the Ukraine oligarchs to whom he owed money. It’s plausible that he didn’t know (or care) about the mysterious last-minute change in the Republican Party platform about the Ukraine.
But when it came to the hijinks of his old friends (Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani) and family (Jared and Don Jr.), I find it impossible to believe that he wasn’t aware that they were working with Russians (including their pawns at Wikileaks) on some sort of skullduggery. The extent of his involvement – whether he just got an occasional heads up from Jared and Don Jr., or participated in some of the planning – has yet to be revealed. But simply on the basis of his famous “Russia, if you’re listening” request for help in finding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, he had to have known that something was going on.
Then there’s Trump’s post-campaign obstruction of justice. He fired Sally Yates, Preet Bharara, and James Comey – basically anyone in a position to investigate him or his family and friends, and who refused to pledge personal loyalty to Trump. He was the principle author at least one of Don Jr’s false accounts of the meeting with Russian agents in July, 2016. I can’t imagine any plausible explanation of those actions that doesn’t include some guilty knowledge of collusion between senior members of his campaign and Russia.
Has Donald Trump been Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot? I say yes, obviously. Trump has been remarkably useful to Russia in weakening America’s influence around the world. On the other hand, if Trump’s clown car full of misfits had been 10% smarter and 10% more subtle, they’d have been 100% more useful to Putin. That’s the tradeoff between useful and idiot.
Would being a useful idiot be an effective defense against impeachment? Lordy, I hope not. The Constitution lists these impeachable offenses: “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” It wouldn’t be hard to make a case for treason. Certainly, if a Republican Congress saw a Democratic President do what Trump has done, they’d happily yell “treason.” Ditto for bribery, as Trump has obviously profited from foreign gifts and business done at his hotels.
“High crimes and misdemeanors” basically means whatever Congress is upset about on a given day. But conspiring with a hostile foreign government to rig a presidential election seems like it would qualify, as would obstruction of justice.
Setting aside the improbability of the current House of Representatives’ voting a bill of impeachment in the first place, it strikes me that Trump’s best defense might be diminished mental capacity. It has the advantage of being almost certainly true, and it’s also what his political foes have been saying for the past year.
What if Trump went to a joint session of Congress and said this: “You know what, guys, I hate to admit it, but I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was, and I’m also suffering from dementia. I was totally oblivious to the fact that pretty much every single member of my inner circle, including my family, was in league with our traditional enemies. I’m chagrined! In good conscience, the only thing I can do is throw myself on your mercy. I’ll resign as president and let Mike Pence take over.”
It’s hard to imagine Trump pursuing any form of that defense. As Mueller tightens the noose, the more stubborn and belligerent he gets.
And how would his base react? They think Trump is playing 8-dimensional chess, always many steps ahead of his hapless enemies in the media. How would they rationalize a guilty plea? Would they take to the streets with Tiki Torches? Go on mass shooting sprees? Both of those outcomes are well within the realm of possibility.
In a world where 29% of Alabama evangelicals say that credible reports that Roy Moore was a child molester would make them MORE likely to vote for him, and in a world where half the Republicans polled last August said they’d be willing to postpone the 2020 presidential election if Trump wanted it, anything might happen. It no longer makes sense to call members of Trump’s base Deplorables. They’re Incorrigibles.
I believe that Trump will get his comeuppance sooner or later. I think the fact that he’s been Putin’s useful idiot will help convict him, not exonerate him. I worry about the Incorrigibles, but we outnumber them, and we can’t let them bully the rest of us.