Shall I tell you the worst part of the Trump-Putin fiasco? It’s not the president’s disgraceful words in Helsinki. It’s not his insistence on some sort of moral equivalence between the United States and the Kremlin kleptocracy. It’s not the pathetic way he tried to row back from what he said. (Seriously? A double negative? With 24 hours at their disposal, that’s the best that White House spin doctors could come up with?)
It’s not the way in which his online supporters rushed half-wittedly to his defense by trashing America’s security agencies. It’s not even the appalling possibility that Putin may have some kompromat or other hold over the leader of the free world.
[Related: Putin on whether he has damaging info on Trump: That’s a ‘load of nonsense’]
No, it’s more depressing than any of these things. It’s that Donald Trump’s words were utterly in character.
You don’t need to think that the Kremlin is blackmailing the President to explain what he said. Trump’s attitude to Putin flows from two ineradicable parts of his personality. First, his admiration for strong leaders, an admiration that borders on Fuhrerprinzip, leading him to flatter Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kim Jong Un while insulting Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau.
Second, his self-absorption, a self-absorption so powerful that it surely qualifies as clinical narcissism. His approach to politics is wholly dominated by who, as he puts it, “says very good things about me.”
This neediness makes him unable to distinguish between his personal feuds and the interests of the West. The fact that his domestic opponents are exploiting Russian interference in the recent election makes him see the whole story as a plot against him, and thus rage at the intelligence agencies that found the evidence. If that puts America in the wrong, so be it.
This is not the first time that Trump has claimed that America is no better than the murderous autocracy in the Kremlin. In an interview last year, Bill O’Reilly put it to him that Putin’s regime murdered people it disliked. Trump’s response? “There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?”
Compared to Russia? Abso-bloody-lutely.
Yet we now know that that was not a stray remark. It expressed Trump’s fundamental view of the world. His foreign policy is defined by who flatters him — and Putin can be an expert flatterer. Washington, like Moscow, has become a latter-day czarist court, in which policy depends on who happens to be the current favorite.
I don’t like having to write these things. Indeed, I don’t like having to watch them. I criticized Trump during the Republican primaries — a position which, though it now seems an eternity ago, was at that time shared by almost every conservative commentator. When he won the nomination, I argued in these pages that the two main parties had chosen candidates unfit for the highest office. If I had the vote, I said, I’d give it to a third party candidate.
After the presidential election, I took what seemed to me the only proper attitude for a friend of America and of American democracy. I accepted the result, wished the new administration well and hoped that my fears would prove unfounded. I could see that the unhinged reaction from large parts of the Left was shoring up support for the president. I didn’t want to be one of those bores who can’t accept an election result.
Nor did I have any problem acknowledging Trump’s achievements, including cutting taxes and bringing the regulatory agencies back under some sort of control. I was grateful for his support for Brexit.
But my doubts about Trump’s character remained — or, rather, were magnified by each new public statement and tweet. Far from becoming more presidential, Trump became more like a teenage girl, pursuing his vendettas with the full power of the state. He seemed unable to distinguish truth from fantasy. (To give a trivial but typical example, he told the British press last week that he had seen Brexit coming when he visited his Scottish golf course the day before the vote, even though the record clearly shows that he arrived there after the result.)
I looked on sadly as American conservatives — including many people I like and admire — followed Trump toward the unlikeliest of intellectual destinations. Evangelicals overlooked his fornication; fastidious Straussians disregarded his boorishness; fiscal hawks looked away as he doubled the deficit. But this — this is in a different category.
Expecting an American leader to back his own country against its enemies is hardly setting the bar high, for heaven’s sake. A U.S. president who can’t meet that basic qualification shames his office and, by extension, his nation.
