Donald Trump has long been loath to concede that operatives of the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election, feeling as he does that the media like to talk about it mainly to suggest that he only defeated Hillary Clinton thanks to the aid of foreign troublemakers. It’s understandable that he would feel some inner conflict about dealing with this subject. His adversaries on the left wouldn’t give a fig about Russian interference if the presidential contest had gone the other way, and the obsessive manner with which many Democrats treat the issue is manifestly about delegitimizing Trump’s presidency rather than holding Russia accountable. Even so, Trump is a grown-up and should be able to distinguish between (a) the now well-documented verdict that Russian operatives interfered in the U.S. election and (b) the as-yet unproven accusation that the Trump campaign actively participated in the Russian efforts. Yet Trump has consistently failed to distinguish between the two claims. That failure led to an appalling performance in Helsinki on July 16, where he publicly took the word of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin over that of his own intelligence personnel.
Asked at the joint press conference whether he credits American intelligence officials’ conclusion that the Russian government was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s server, Trump could have declined to answer or been vague. Instead the president complained again that the FBI didn’t confiscate his 2016 opponent’s email server and then took Putin’s side: “My people came to me, [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats and some others. They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
It only got worse. When Putin was asked why Americans should believe that Russia did not intervene in the election, Trump jumped in to defend the dictator: “The whole concept of that came up perhaps a little bit before, but it came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly they should have been able to win, because the Electoral College is more advantageous for Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans. . . . We ran a brilliant campaign, and that’s why I’m president.”
That Trump said all this on foreign soil, and in the presence of one of this nation’s chief adversaries, only adds to the outrage.
The president’s defenders, incapable as ever of criticizing the man for any reason, immediately began comparing the president’s remarks to Barack Obama’s hot-mike remarks to Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev that “after my election I have more flexibility.” That was a deplorable moment in presidential history, to be sure, but it doesn’t compare to what Trump did in openly crediting a foreign dictator’s assertion over that of American intelligence officials. In any case, we are fully confident that if Barack Obama had expressed himself as Donald Trump did today, the latter’s defenders would have condemned Obama as the stooge of a foreign power.
If we judge the administration by its policies rather than the president by his words, Trump isn’t a stooge. The Treasury Department’s sanctions on Russian oligarchs are clearly complicating Putin’s ability to maintain his power, and the Defense Department is rightly arming the beleaguered fighters of Ukraine. But words have consequences—especially words spoken by the leader of one superpower about the leader of another in an open diplomatic forum. Trump encouraged the nation’s enemies, insulted its intelligence officers, made himself look like a fool, and thus brought disgrace on the presidency and the country.
A number of congressional Republicans, and not just his usual critics, either distanced themselves from Trump’s remarks or straightforwardly rebuked him—Speaker Paul Ryan, Peter Roskam, Liz Cheney, and Ryan Costello in the House; Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Thom Tillis, Orrin Hatch, and Richard Burr in the Senate. The explosive reaction to the president’s performance may have jolted him into his absurd assertion on July 16 that he had misspoken and had meant to say that he didn’t see why it “wouldn’t” have been Russia. In an interview with CBS, he followed up by asserting it was “true” that Russian actors had meddled in the U.S. election. We are deeply skeptical of Trump’s claim in that interview that he told Putin privately that “we can’t have meddling, we can’t have any of that,” but we’re glad at least that he no longer denies the Russian’s election-tampering malice.
Only one president in history, Andrew Jackson, has ever been censured by Congress, but Republicans on the Hill would not be out of line in seeking a formal censure of Donald Trump. Such a measure would be largely symbolic, yes. But symbols matter. It would be no small thing for congressional Republicans to declare, in a formal manner, that a president who coddles and defends an anti-American despot doesn’t deserve their support. It’s hardly a farfetched idea: Many congressional Democrats, remember, advocated censure rather than the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998. Passage of a censure resolution by the House or Senate would bring no concrete consequences to Trump, but it would be a powerful statement from the GOP that the party’s leaders will not simply ignore or excuse a U.S. president’s openly crediting America’s enemies at the expense of its public servants—and of the truth.
