President-elect Trump was correct to criticize the website BuzzFeed for violating journalistic standards in publishing an unverified, salacious and at times provably false memo. But he goes further and seems to chastise anyone who asks about his views of, or ties to, Russia.
While some charges against Trump relating to Russia have been proven bogus, others are plausible enough to have piqued the interest of intelligence agencies, law enforcement and Republican senators. Trump and his team cannot wave all questions away as “speculation” and “unverifiable.” Those are the arguments of a defendant in a court of law, and they do not remove the cloud of suspicion in the court of public opinion.
Trump needs to do more because at the moment, it’s hard to shake an uneasiness about Trump and Russia.
He has lost the benefit of the doubt on this matter. He and his allies, in telling us to disregard various allegations, are asking us to ignore too many bits of corroborating circumstantial evidence that suggests an unseemly intimacy between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s corrupt regime.
Exhibit A is Trump’s disinclination to criticize or confront Putin’s Russia over the country’s hacking of American politicians and apparent efforts to destabilize our democracy.
Fondness for Russia and admiration of Putin is arguably Trump’s most consistent position. And the charge of Russian election interference is a matter of consensus held with high confidence among the intelligence community. Trump, nonetheless, spent more than a month avoiding the topic and waving aside questions, as if he were afraid of criticizing Putin.
To his credit, Trump said plainly on Wednesday, at last, that he believed Russia was behind the hacking, and he said aloud that the hack was bad. Good for him. But even then the president-elect was evasive, veering off to discuss Democrats’ poor cybersecurity and China’s OPM hack, as if trying to shift as much blame as possible away from Russia.
Exhibit B was his campaign manager Paul Manafort. Picking Manafort, a literal foreign agent who has worked for the Kremlin and other dictatorial regimes, was an early misdeed by Trump that today gives credence to any Russia charges flung his way.
Trump fired Manafort when Manafort’s secret payments from Russia-backed operatives in Ukraine became too politically poisonous. But Manafort never really left. After the election, he advised Trump on Cabinet picks. If Trump wants to clear up concern about Russia’s influence in his campaign, hiring an agent of Putin to run his campaign and help staff his administration isn’t the way to do it.
Manafort was likely behind Exhibit C: The removal from the Republican platform of language calling on the U.S. to arm Ukraine “with lethal defensive weapons” against Russian invaders. The Trump campaign quietly and unilaterally spiked this language just before the July convention.
How to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression is debatable, but the Trump campaign didn’t allow debate, and Trump has never provided an account for this change to the platform.
The President-elect can set this straight by clearly standing up for Ukraine and pledging whatever support the besieged country needs.
Exhibit D is the odd closeness to Russia of some of his picks. Mike Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, has in the past year changed his rhetoric and become a consistent Putin apologist. Flynn has taken money from the regime via the state-owned television station RT.
Rex Tillerson, secretary of state-designate, also has complicating entanglements with Russia. Tillerson has done a good job in his hearings of showing toughness towards Russia. He owed the Senate this candor and toughness. Now Trump and Flynn do, too.
Trump’s own odd behavior is Exhibit E. He spent weeks denigrating the intelligence community. Separately, he rebutted allegations about his coziness with Russia with a tweet beginning with the words, “Russia just said … .”
Trump also says he has had “no deals, no loans, no nothing” in Russia. This is an overstatement. He held a beauty pageant there, and we know he’s tried to make real estate deals there. Also, we would know more about where he has business dealings and loans if he followed modern political norms and disclosed his tax returns.
Waving away allegations about his ties to Russia by calling them “unverified” isn’t adequate. Before taking office, Trump owes it to the public to clear the air. He can do this by laying out real consequences for Russian hacking and meddling, promising real aid to Ukraine, distancing himself from Manafort and shooting straighter on his taxes and his business entanglements.
If the public and the press are suspicious of Trump’s stance on Russia, it’s because of Trump’s own doing. He needs to fix this.
