In retrospect, we shouldn’t have been surprised: President Trump said nothing in the course of his dismaying, obsequious press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin that he hasn’t said on Twitter and in person a hundred times before. We shouldn’t have been surprised to see Trump blame America for Russian meddling in the 2016 election; to see him not only refuse to hold Putin’s feet to the fire, but actively to cover and make excuses for the Russian leader; to deflect again and again, as he has done for months, to Democratic obstruction and to Hillary Clinton’s email server and to the supposed duplicity of special counsel Robert Mueller. He’d been tweeting these sentiments only hours before.
Yet Trump, ever the showman, maintains the ability to shock. And so it was still surprising to see him make these prevarications while standing two feet from the smirking autocrat whose government, we know with increasing certainty, deliberately sought to sow discord and upend our democracy two years ago.
It was only last Friday that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein held a press conference to announce that special counsel Mueller was filing charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers detailing the specific illegal actions they took to hack the computers of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the announcement, Rosenstein pointed out with enormous emphasis that Russia’s attack had not been against the Democrats only, but against America as a whole.
“When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans,” he said. “Our response must not depend on which side was victimized. The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are always hard-fought and contentious. There will always be adversaries who seek to exacerbate our divisions and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us. So long as we are united in our commitment to the values enshrined in the Constitution, they will not succeed.”
Coming on the eve of the Trump-Putin summit, Rosenstein’s implicit plea was clear: President Trump, this attack wasn’t just an attack on your enemies—it was an attack on your country, and on you.
Rosenstein needn’t have bothered. It was clear from Trump’s first answer that he had no interest in Mueller’s newest evidence that Russia had meddled and that Putin had repeatedly lied about it—he cared only that it made him look bad. “I think that the probe is a disaster for our country. It’s kept us apart. It’s kept us separated. There was no collusion, at all. Everybody knows it,” Trump said. “I beat Hillary Clinton easily … We won that race, and it’s a shame that there should be even a little bit of a cloud over it.”
The second question was straightforward and directed at Putin: “Why should Americans and why should President Trump believe your statement that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election, given the evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies have provided?”
It would have been a tough question for Putin to answer—but he didn’t have to, as Trump butted in again: “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.”
Later, Trump was asked even more directly: “Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. My first question for you, sir, is who do you believe?”
It would have been a tough question for Trump to answer, given it was Putin’s word against a mountain of hard evidence obtained by the American government. So he didn’t answer it at all. Instead, Trump retreated to ground he was more familiar with: Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“So let me just say that we have two thoughts: You have groups that are pondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months, and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server?… 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, but I really do want to see the server.”
At every turn, President Trump laid out plainly the whole problem with his approach to Russia: He remains unable to disassociate Putin’s aggressive and illegal actions from the suggestion that they helped him win the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton. And because he cannot bear the suggestion that he didn’t beat her fair and square, he refuses to acknowledge that Putin did anything aggressive and illegal at all. This is nothing we didn’t know before. But the dire consequences were never more apparent than they were on Monday.
The result: A face-to-face meeting where Putin should have been made to sweat and account for his destabilizing actions in America and around the world turned into a cakewalk for the autocrat. He had succeeded in destabilizing America beyond his wildest dreams, and here was the American president on stage with him, saying America was to blame for it. All he had to do was sit back and watch.
“As to who is to be believed, and who is not to be believed, you can trust no one if you take this,” Putin said. “Where did you get this idea that President Trump trusts me or I trust him?”
