President Trump says he didn’t collude with Russia in 2016, promising something to a foreign country in exchange for his installation as president. That seems increasingly likely to prove true.
Where they do not spring from simple malignancy, critics’ arguments that Trump used Russian intervention to win the election are mostly an excuse to avoid the plain truth that Hillary Clinton deservedly lost because she was an awful candidate. And the country is better for that result.
We aren’t persuaded, either, that the Russians’ paltry $100,000 in Facebook spending had anything to do with Trump’s win, given that very little of it was spent during the general election or in the key swing states anyway.
Yet Russian meddling in American public life is real, as the Robert Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency demonstrates. It includes not just that pathetic $100,000, but more broadly the extensive and long-term efforts by Russian intelligence to influence American public opinion that go back before Trump was a candidate for anything.
Russian intelligence appears to have painstakingly built up a capability using social media to divide Americans politically and create an illusion that fringe opinions are moving into the mainstream. What’s more, it is a sophisticated operation that would have been difficult for an ordinary consumer of news to trace back to its foreign origins.
The Russians have used America’s openness against it, and that deserves close investigation. All angry left-liberal hopes aside, it will probably have almost nothing to do with Trump in the end. Indeed, Mueller’s own language in the indictment characterizes him as an “unwitting” beneficiary.
But Trump, in his rage and ill-discipline, doesn’t seem to care. He wants this investigation to go away, and he seems to be on the edge of destroying himself in order to make that happen. The way he is acting makes it seem like he is worried that the probe will uncover something else, perhaps something about his business dealings. And he needs to be told that it makes him look guilty as hell every time he does it.
Trump makes his situation worse obsessing over this investigation. Anyone who loves this country, Trump-friend or Trump-foe, needs to hold him back and tell him to stop it, to let the investigators do their thing unmolested, unbullied, and unthreatened.
Republican members of Congress who have Trump’s ear must especially urge him to occupy his mind elsewhere. Don’t interfere with the probe. Don’t fire Mueller. Wait for the findings before picking your bones with the investigators.
Tell him the best thing he can do about Mueller is to ignore him. Tell him to stop launching into rants about the investigation before it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, bringing about even more unpresidential behavior that actually threatens his presidency.
After all, it was never established that President Richard Nixon participated in or knew anything about the Watergate break-in. His downfall came solely because of how he reacted in obstructing the investigation into what happened.
Those are footsteps in which no president should aspire to follow.
